Martin Puchner
H. Gordon Garbedian Chair in English and Comparative Literature
Co-Chair, Theatre Ph.D. Program
Research -- World Literature
The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 6 volumes, General Editor, in preparation.
The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, General Editor, in preparation.
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
A study in the geography of modernity based on the proliferation and distribution of political and artistic manifestos in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book takes manifestos to be the central genre of modernity, what Marx called the "poetry
of the revolution": the genre through which modernity sought to articulate its revolutionary ambitions. Case studies range from
the theatrically-declaimed manifestos of Futurism and Dadaism to mixtures of drama and manifesto in the early twentieth
century, but they also include the manifesto theater of Antonin Artaud and the happenings of the Situationists. The book
concludes with a chapter on the history of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies to gauge the challenges faced by a theatrical
avant-garde since the sixties.
Winner, 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded by the MLA.
Honorable Mention, 2007 Modernist Studies Book Prize.
Reviews
Politics and Culture 2:2; Modernism/Modernity 14:1; TDR: The Drama Review 51:1(Spring 2007); Theatre Survey 48:1 (Spring 2007); Svenska
Dagbladet (February 7, 2007); European Journal of English Studies 10:3 (December 2006); Papers of Surrealism No 5 (2007); Hallands Nyheter (February
12, 2007); New Left Review (November 2008); Electronic book review (March 13, 2008); Theatre Journal 48:3 (2007); Year's Work in English Study XIV (May
2008); Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 7:1 (2008); Videri; Art Manifesto article on Wikipedia; Recherche Litteraire/Literary Research 25 (Summer 2009).
Related Publications
Martin Puchner, "Fem teser om manifestets framtid," Klassekampen, Friday, June 29th, 2007, pp.14-15. Reprinted in: Rett Kopi dokumenterer fremtiden,
edited by Karin Nygoard and Ellef Prestaeter, Rett Kopi, 2007: 182-183.
The book was featured in the following colloquia and reading groups:
-Modernist Studies Association, Tulsa (October 22).
-ASTR, November 2006
-University of Virginia, Seminar, March 2007
The "Communist Manifesto" and Other Writings, with an introduction and notes by Martin Puchner (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005).
"1848--The Reinvention of a Genre," in New History of German Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
"Dünyasal Edebiyat" (Wordly Literature), in Varlik, March 2009.
Dünyasal Edebiyat (Worldly Literature), Istanbul, December 2008.
Maps, Genres and the Geography of Literature, Keynote address, Southern Comparative Literature Association,
Also see:
Academic consultant, WGBH series on world literature.
"When We Were Clones: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro," Raritan Review (spring 2008).