Timothy Mathews

    Biography
    Publications
->    Creative nonfiction, and writing 
       that’s hard to categorise
->    Translating and writing
->    Critical writing, writing the critical
->    Collaborations
->    Editing
    Upcoming
    Archive
    Email






Thinking Through Relation. Encounters in Creative Critical Writing
Edited by Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Thea Petrou, Peter Lang 2021

https://www.peterlang.com/document/1146940



Each contribution to the book marks the unique efforts of a situated being to make sense of the world that exceeds their knowledge and understanding. Every enquiry into form and content is a new beginning, and therefore shot through with exhilaration and uncertainty. It starts from the experience of curiosity, vulnerability and entanglement that accompanies the encounter with the unfamiliar. What does it mean to see or read a work of art for the first time, or with fresh eyes? How can we mark this moment of creative beginning? We are disoriented and curious. We ponder, look for cues and let our gaze drift. This is an old world, but new to us, and newly transformed by our presence. It will eventually become familiar.

Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Thea Petrou 
from their Prelude to this book.


For I know that only poetry and people renew the world
And that our streets are adorned with the fellowships of language.

Timothy Mathews reading Guillaume Apollinaire 
in this book.



This book is an offering. It contains eighteen essays in honour of Timothy Mathews, written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. These essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They advance fresh interpretations of some important figures in twentieth-century European culture – Apollinaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Calvino, Dalí, Genet, Nooteboom, Roubaud – using modes of reading that are both intellectually brave and open to fragility, intimate as well as critical, at once playful and earnest. They bring texts and artworks into relation in order to amply demonstrate that relation itself is a form of thinking.

This book in honour of Timothy Mathews is much more than a Festschrift. It is a collection of thought-provoking, daring insights into the crucial place of literature and the arts in our world and in our being human. It is an exhilarating, multifarious demonstration of how creativity can undo, without for a moment losing intellectual rigour, the disciplinary and academic structures that constrain our thinking. Driven by curiosity and by care – love, even – the many contributions to the volume show, in their different ways, how criticism can be at its most effective by being at its most imaginative and its least predictable.  

Professor Lucia Boldrini, 
Goldsmiths, University of London

Thinking Through Relation brings together an outstanding collection of essays that explore the diverse ways in which works of art and aesthetic experience generate a richness of relation which escapes the straightjackets of rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Clearly demonstrating the creative potential of critical writing, these essays are a fitting tribute to the creativity, originality and subtlety of Timothy Mathews’s scholarly accomplishment, and his contribution to our understanding of art and of the aesthetic relation.

Professor Ian James, 
University of Cambridge


Prev    Next