Touch to Affliction

Fiction & Literature, Poetry
Cover of the book Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens, Coach House Books
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Author: Nathalie Stephens ISBN: 9781770562264
Publisher: Coach House Books Publication: September 4, 2006
Imprint: Coach House Books Language: English
Author: Nathalie Stephens
ISBN: 9781770562264
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication: September 4, 2006
Imprint: Coach House Books
Language: English

From the ruins of poetry, fiction and philosophy comes Touch To Affliction, a meditation on the notion of homeland, on patrie and the inhumanity that arises from it.

This is a text obsessed with ruins: the ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body. The history of the twentieth century is a history of barbarism, and Stephens walks, like a flâneur, through its midst, experiencing through her own body the crumbled buildings, the dessicated cities, the eviscerated language and humanity of our time, calling out in passing to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Gorecki, Simone Weil. In the end, it considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Insistently political but never polemical, Touch To Affliction, at the interstices of thought and the unnameable, is at once lament, accusation and elegy.

About Paper City: ‘Understanding is almost antithetical to the project Stephens seems to have assigned herself, that of unraveling or radically altering our sense of logic, of language, of narrative, of body, of desire, of words on paper. She wants the book to burn in our hands and, indeed, it does.’ – NewPages

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

From the ruins of poetry, fiction and philosophy comes Touch To Affliction, a meditation on the notion of homeland, on patrie and the inhumanity that arises from it.

This is a text obsessed with ruins: the ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body. The history of the twentieth century is a history of barbarism, and Stephens walks, like a flâneur, through its midst, experiencing through her own body the crumbled buildings, the dessicated cities, the eviscerated language and humanity of our time, calling out in passing to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Gorecki, Simone Weil. In the end, it considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Insistently political but never polemical, Touch To Affliction, at the interstices of thought and the unnameable, is at once lament, accusation and elegy.

About Paper City: ‘Understanding is almost antithetical to the project Stephens seems to have assigned herself, that of unraveling or radically altering our sense of logic, of language, of narrative, of body, of desire, of words on paper. She wants the book to burn in our hands and, indeed, it does.’ – NewPages

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