Books in the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series

Art, William Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of academic disciplines. The studio is where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity.

Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis-à-vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.

A work on the shaping of our architectural environment.

When we talk about education, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of "mastery," with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in pedagogy.

Kermode examines enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible-and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure.

The author begins his "nonlectures" with the warning "I haven't the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer." These talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e. e. cummings. Together, they form a good introduction to his work.

Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

In this exhilarating book, we accompany Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in with a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.

Linda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book confronts the issues posed in representations of the body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists.

A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America's foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.