Faust - Softcover

Parmar, Sandeep

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848618271 ISBN 13: 9781848618275

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2022

Synopsis

Goethe's version of the scholar's fateful wager with Mephistopheles inspires the central sequence of Faust, mapped onto the figure of the migrant who flees a post-colonial legacy of fire, displacement and climate destruction for a life of eternal striving. As Parmar asks in 'The Winnowing Shovel': 'How is striving itself, as an idea built into literary models and real-life stereotypes of the good immigrant or the model minority, how might striving-in the Faustian sense-provide a way of thinking about heroism, tragedy (modern and ancient) and migratory grief? Who chooses to leave and why, who attempts to return, who stays on, who, to borrow from Bhanu Kapil's image of reverse migration, is made psychotic in a national space, who is this hero who journeys, who strives and for what? To be visible or invisible? As others have looked to the Faust legend for ways to explore the insatiability of man's appetites, the questions I put to Goethe's version specifically bring together three strands: striving as a fear of and countermeasure against mortality; a critique of globalisation and technology; and the female element underlying male aggression, destruction and desire.'

About this title

About the Author

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs Liverpool's Centre for New and International Writing. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her books include Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern, an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011), and two books of her own poetry published by Shearsman: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. She also edited the Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet, 2016). Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement and BBC Radio 3. She is co-founder of the Ledbury Poetry Critics scheme for poetry critics of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848618271
• ISBN 13: 9781848618275
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92