Books by Camelia Elias

This bi-lingual book tells the story of an encounter with a place, Agger, on the West Coast of Denmark. Denne to-sprogede bog fortæller historien om forfatterens møde med Agger, et sted på den danske Vestkyst.

This is a book of haiku poems using the Arcades Tarot as an inspiration.

This book deconstructs the 22 trumps of the Marseille Tarot, bringing a fresh and original perspective to divination. The book aims to inspire both seasoned and inexperienced diviners.

READING THE MARSEILLE TAROT, THE SUBTLE, YET SHARP WAY.

This book highlights the importance of reading cards in context, rather than seeing them as carriers of inherent signification. The focus is on the pip cards of the Marseille Tarot. The style follows the same tone as in the companion book: The Power of the Trumps: A Subtle Burst, whose premise is to deconstruct set cartomantic clichés.

In this book Camelia Elias introduces key terms in feminist, queer, and postcolonial/diaspora film. Taking her point of departure in the question, "what do you want from me?" she detours through Lacanian theory of the gaze and reframes questions of subjectivity and representation in an entertaining entanglement of visual with textual poetics in film.

This book aims to cover four basic questions: Why do we read cards? What's so special about the Marseille Tarot? How can the cards uncover our blind spots? What does it mean to live a magical life, when we allow the stories that the cards tell us to offer solutions to our real problems? The book is also the first to introduce the readers to the wonderful and strange cards of Carolus Zoya, a most rare and unseen Tarot de Marseille deck made in Turin at the end of 1700.

The Way of the Sign is a book about extraction, about reducing methods of inquiry to the bare bones. In a clear, concise, and dialogic style, Camelia Elias guides students through 10 schools of theory and criticism. The focus is on 'asking' each theory to give its best in the simplest way, by making us see what is at stake and how we might respond to it.

The epistemic creative writer is not merely an expressive writer, a writer who writes for creative writing programs at diverse university colleges. Rather, the epistemic creative writer is the writer who understands that in order to say something useful you must step out of the space that engages your ego. Awareness of what really matters comes from the contemplation of the futility of words. Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. This book is about extracting what writing means to a few writers who formulate ideas about creative writing without, however, making claims to instruction. Can creative writing that produces knowledge be taught without a method? Samuel Beckett, Raymond Federman, Gertrude Stein, Jacques Lacan, Frank O'Hara, Douglas Hofstadter, Brian Rotman, Herman Melville, Kathy Acker, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Markson, Andrei Codrescu, and a host of others, gather here to offer an answer. -- "Camelia Elias speaks to the reader from that place where the language of the birds becomes the language of silence." (Patrick Blackburn, Professor of Formal Logic, Roskilde University)

This volume of prose poems takes the reader through a journey which starts in the living-room. At the core of the collection are a number of Socratic dialogic exchanges between the main speaker of each poem and a number of other figures (fictional and non-fictional). The initiating conversations between a woman and a man continue through dialogues between the woman speaker and other voices (mainly academics and writers) and culminate with exchanges between the woman's voice and that of literary protagonists. There is an intended symmetry at work between the poems which are dedicated to real-life authors and the poems which are dedicated to fictional characters. The poems show how literature is entangled with the geography of being on more than one level.

This is a book of fragments and prose poetry celebrating what mothers try to pass on to their children: a sense of how to be grateful for the experiences in life that can be said to be not only beautiful but also significant in form. The author's own mother, a logician, emerges as a powerful woman who has things to say to people she encounters through mediation: mathematicians, prophets, lovers, and fools. The introduction to the collection is an informative memoir which entangles the personal essay with the formal properties of writing that can be said to be both epistemic, creating a certain kind of knowledge, and also creative in terms of approaches to narrative.

Pulverizing Portraits provides the first book-length study of contemporary American poet Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's poetry is significant because it situates itself in relation to current debates about the state of poetry, creative writing in the academia, and the importance of drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to poetry via visual aesthe-tics, poststructuralist literary and theoretical perspectives, and philosophy. Camelia Elias takes a look at what characterizes contemporary American prose poetry, namely an intensified awareness of being close to something. Poets such as Lynn Emanuel have been increasingly concerned with poetry as a tool for cultural criticism which constantly redefines our poetic discourse. Elias traces the power of Emanuel's writing and looks at her subtleties in combining intrinsic and formal constraints in poetry with extrinsic and socio-historical methodologies. Elias's analyses of Emanuel's poetic genius culminate in a plethora of references which bring together painters, philosophers, poets, critics, and actors. Thus, the poet's father, the painter Akiba Emanuel, meets Giorgio Agamben, Charles Simic, Gertrude Stein, and Sharon Stone. They all contribute to voicing the world's "interminable speeches."

Transatlantic studies is an emerging field within literary, cultural and political studies. Its interdisciplinary scope, a feature it shares with other area studies fields, makes it particularly apt for AAU scholars to engage with. All European languages and cultures have significantly been shaped by their long history of interaction across the Atlantic Ocean, often antagonistically defined (as in wars and trade conflicts), but often also collaboratively defined (indeed, as in wars and trade alliances). The perspective is equally rich when seen from the Americas, where the relationship with Europe, can be variously regarded as colonial/postcolonial, or as pay-back/writing back to the ancestral cultures.This volume sets out to investigate specific aspects of Transatlantic cultural and/or textual exchanges in any period and mode the authors see fit. We have accepted both humanities approaches and textually focused social sciences approaches. The broad scope of the volume is indeed one of its essential strengths, as all readers of it will be sure to encounter new subjects areas and insights. The aim is therefore to be inclusive rather than exclusive in this book, allowing colleagues from all programs within our broad department to contribute papers from their core research areas, whether these chiefly fall within English, Spanish, German, French or other European language areas – or whether they are chiefly linked to one or another of the Americas.The volume is, appropriately enough, conceived as a transatlantic collaborative endeavor in its own right, as it features contributions from both AAU and Brenau University, Georgia, USA – one of our exchange partner universities.

Cultural Text Studies is a research project initiated by the Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics at Aalborg University. The present intro­duct­ory volume launches a series of themed monographs which will be edited by researchers at the Dept., occasionally aided by friends and associates from other programmes. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text.This interdisciplinary field of research springs from an emergent interest in both studying texts culturally and in studying culture as text. Thus it is cultural text studies in the sense that the object of study consists of all readable cultural phenomena which are regarded as texts in a much more broadly defined sense than in the traditional field of literary studies. Yet it is also cultural text studies, in the sense that, while the approach is cultural as opposed to, say, formalist, the work often entails an intense engagement with texts and close readings thereof. CTS – An Introduction is a volume authored by present and past members of the English programme’s teaching staff in the fields of culture, literature and media studies. The essays range widely in terms of the period, genre, and medium of the texts investigated. Focus areas include Victorian literature and art; high modernism, especially approached from the point of view of a centre/margin discourse; and finally postmodernist aesthetics and its embedded move from literary into cultural studies, as witnessed by essays on world music, shoes, Hollywood, the post-ironic, the de-territorialized, and the post-human condition as cultural texts.