Untimely Passages Dossiers from the Other Shore

"Provoking and elegant essays on European and North American modernism and postmodernism. These essays by anarcho-modernist critic Jerry Zaslove emerge from years of reading, writing, and teaching through the exemplary controversies, commitments, and crises of modernism in European literature. The collection is imagined through the image of a Colporteur, a traveling figure appearing along the streets and waysides, crossing bridges, walking with books through the arcades of cities. Literary artworks and philosophical themes explored in Untimely Passages include Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Herbert Read's modernist "nomadism," and W.G. Sebald's "exilic memory," along with central figures of Europe's intellectual modernity, including Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka. Special attention is also given to the significant work of Canadian writers and artists: Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, Robin Blaser, Alex Morrison, Althea Thauberger, and Jeff Wall. "We read books, and they read us," Zaslove writes. "The books belong to us, intervene, and accompany us, and on rereading them they may even become strange again. The world changes as it flows; we become Colporteurs of our own reading and writing. We can become like Sancho Panza who tells stories that speak to the Don's idealism." Untimely Passages is organized into "dossiers" - imaginary bridges set over the collection's literary river crossings. The book shows a life in writing by crossing rivers to the "other shores." While it is true, according to Heraclitus, that we can't "step into the same river twice," we can however cross to the other shores and watch the rivers flowing, and even cross back again and again by rereading and writing, often posing the fundamental question of literacy: "Why write?" Jerry Zaslove is a teacher and writer in comparative literature and the social history of art. He has taught at Simon Fraser University since its inception in 1965 in the Departments of English and Humanities and the School for the Contemporary Arts. He is the founding director of the Institute for the Humanities and is a Simons Fellow in Graduate Liberal Studies."--