The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. "Loiterature" is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance. By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear--values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand. If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature's digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.

"Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press"
"" Modeled after the famed TV sci-fi series "The X-Files," "The &-Files" gathers together a covert body of documents following the long and often controversial career of "Art & Text," one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957-92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
Perceived through the eyes and ears of its longtime publisher and editor Paul Foss, "The &-Files" is comprised of an open letter, a lengthy interview, two questionnaires, and other commentaries and bibliographies, offering a unique insider account of the extraordinary advantages and pitfalls of publishing an art magazine.

Ross Chambers, an eminent critic of French literature, proposes an original theory of the development of French modernism. His bold rereading of mid-nineteenth-century texts, from Madame Bovary to Les Fleurs du mal, leads to a reconception of the workings of narrative - in themselves and in relation to history. Chambers makes a distinction between a text's formal mode of address (narrative function) and the reflexive devices by which it invites interpretation (textual function). The works he considers reveal a discontinuity or disjunction between these two functions and as a result seem uncentered, their manner of conveying meaning oddly blurred. In this they recall the general malaise that swept through French society in the wake of the failed revolution of 1848. Chambers shows how the internal opposition of narrative and textual function, often read as a willful resistance to this historical ennui, is actually its symptom. Pursuing this argument through works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, Chambers uses theoretical insights to illuminate textual details, which in turn clarify and advance his theory. The process yields a subtle and compelling meditation on the powers of writing and reading, which contributes significantly to the debate about the historical status of literary texts. At the heart of the book is the concept of oppositionality; in this respect The Writing of Melancholy is both a necessary complement to Chambers's previous work in Room for Maneuver and a discreet homage by a member of the post-1968 generation to those who were thirty-something in 1848. Originally published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to include an entirely newchapter on Gerard de Nerval's "Sylvie".