Floating between the shadows of the Eiffel Tower and the rundown shanties of the American west, Katy Masuga takes us on a gutting ride of love and loss, crafting a new vocabulary for the inescapable bonds of kinship and the wounds that make us. The Blue of Night is told with the straightforward ache of a mountain ballad, leavened with the modernist time of Faulkner and Proust. I awoke from the book devastated but clear, lit with courage and hunger, brain tickled, ready to race until my lungs burned. --Lauren Du Graf, award-winning arts critic
Identifying six significant writers--Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Lewis Carroll, Proust and D. H. Lawrence--Katy Masuga examines their influence on Miller's work as well as Miller's retroactive impact on their writing. She explores four forms of intertextuality in relation to each 'ancestral' author: direct allusions, unconscious style, reverse influence and participation of the ancestral author as part of the story within the text. The study is informed by the theories of polyvocity from Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva and of language games and the indefatigability of writing in the work of Blanchot, Wittgenstein and Deleuze.By presenting Miller in intertextual context, he emerges as a noteworthy modernist writer whose contributions to literature include the struggle to find a distinctive voice alongside a distinguished lineage of literary figures.
Full of surprises, Masuga retranscribes history into our bodies as we go with her from one world to another on a kind of train ride forward in the pursuit of something ethereal, ephemeral or metaphysical, something that is constantly moving away from loss-that of the grandfather, of the mother, of war, of the birds who never made it on their "eternal search of the Great Enigma" to Simorgh. This book explores the inside-outside paradox of being and living in a world among others. As such, it demands attention and patience. Carefully constructed, even if it at times deceptively appearing like a stream of consciousness narrative, Masuga's The Origin of Vermilion is thought-provoking, moving and delightful. An unexpected, nomadic voyage. -Jennifer K. Dick, author of Circuits and Fluorescence; founding curator, Ivy Writers Paris; poetry editor, Versal The Arcades Project has been achieved in novel form, replete with protagonist, plot tension, and climax. Didn't we all want into being this passage not only through the mind but also the life of the mind surrounding it? Crossing the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, philosophy and ekphrasis, diary and religious text, Masuga reveals our innermost ambition to us: to matter-not merely, but to animate it. -Amy Wright, author of Wherever the Land Is and Everything in the Universe; nonfiction editor, Zone 3 Press A compelling storyteller, Katy Masuga has an outstanding and imaginative eye for detail. In haunting prose and in intricate, linked narratives, Masuga explores with poise and grace subjects that range from the spiritual to the political, from philosophy to history. At ease discussing everything from May Day celebrations to Annie Oakley to Ludwig Wittgenstein to recounting the captivating story of a girl named Shirt, Katy Masuga tells in depth and with great care and rare clarity The Origin of Vermilion. -Heather Hartley, author of Knock Knock (finalist, National Poetry Series); Paris editor, Tin House Katy Masuga combines a brilliantly off-kilter story with sterling prose and achieves greatness. Her characters demand attention and, more importantly, affection. This is a book to read quietly, to marvel at, and to return to. -Adam Robinson, author of Adam Robison and Other Poems; founding editor, Publishing Genius
Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the possibility of difference and instability within language itself. Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor literature, Blanchot's "infinite curve," and Bataille's theory of puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language from within. Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature, cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Identifying six significant writers--Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Lewis Carroll, Proust and D. H. Lawrence--Katy Masuga examines their influence on Miller's work as well as Miller's retroactive impact on their writing. She explores four forms of intertextuality in relation to each 'ancestral' author: direct allusions, unconscious style, reverse influence and participation of the ancestral author as part of the story within the text. The study is informed by the theories of polyvocity from Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva and of language games and the indefatigability of writing in the work of Blanchot, Wittgenstein and Deleuze.By presenting Miller in intertextual context, he emerges as a noteworthy modernist writer whose contributions to literature include the struggle to find a distinctive voice alongside a distinguished lineage of literary figures.
Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the possibility of difference and instability within language itself. Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor literature, Blanchot's "infinite curve," and Bataille's theory of puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language from within. Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature, cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.
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