Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven

    By Antoine Volodine

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "The interconnected works of Volodinethink Faulkner, but after an apocalypseconstitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."Maria Clementi

    That is what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature. . . . It was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies. This fight was now confined solely to Bassmann's lips.

    Like with Antoine Volodine's other works (Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers), Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writersthose who practice "post-exoticism"have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.

    With its explanations of several key "post-exoticist" terms that appear in Volodine's other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature.

    Antoine Volodine is the author of dozens of books under a few different pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. These novelsseveral of which are available in Englisharticulate a post-exoticist universe filled with secrets, revolutionary writers, and spiders.

    J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation Studies program and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Letter
    Release dateApr 20, 2015
    ISBN9781940953120
    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven

    Read more from Antoine Volodine

    Related to Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Oceans

      Mar 15, 2019

      I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up. It was like that all my life. Then we moved to California, and after eight years of earthquakes I began to doubt my ability to put things i

      12 min read

    • Article

      José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

      Nov 21, 2023

      American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso. The post José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Objects of Desire

      Jan 28, 2024

      Objects of Desire
      15 min read

    • Article

      Noteworthy:

      Nov 23, 2021

      Noteworthy:
      1 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Apr 12, 2023

      U.S. Supreme Court decisions on policing, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, death certificates, physics textbooks, property labels on books. In their debut poetry collection, I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, published in May by Alice James Books, Cand

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems by Max Jacob

      Sep 15, 2018

      In the summer of 1935, the young Elizabeth Bishop, only recently graduated from Vassar College, set out on one of her many voyages. This was a trip to France. After a homesick crossing by ship, she spent a month in the small port of Douarnenez, on th

      6 min read

    • Article

      Bhanu Kapil

      Mar 15, 2019

      Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village. A motorbike was coming from the opposite direction. The driver of the motorbi

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Burning House

      Jul 2, 2018

      The Burning House
      14 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Muse

      Mar 1, 2020

      Muse
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Living Mandelstam

      May 1, 2020

      It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Dav

      13 min read

    • Article

      Ghosts in Manhattan

      Mar 1, 2024

      Ghosts in Manhattan
      3 min read

    • Article

      Obsession Is Universal

      Apr 19, 2018

      Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition.  It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain.  Three recently

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven

    4.5/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      How to describe this book? The 11th lesson of Post-Exoticism appears to be that Post-Exoticism cannot be understood by anyone outside of the prison system; not only can it not be understood, it does not want to be understood. For Post-Exotics prison is a lesser hell than the hell of living in a politically retrograde valueless capitalist society. They are, all of them, political dissidents who refuse to be assimilated, who refuse even to use the same linguistic conventions as deemed acceptable to the "free" world. A heady and tough read. Volodine's perpetual task is to make clear the theoretical and literary style of Post-Exoticism, as if to make it intelligible, but then refuses that intelligibility is possible for anyone who is not part of the Resistance.

    Book preview

    Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven - Antoine Volodine

    1.Fragmentary Inventory of Deceased Dissidents

    Arostegui, Maria (1975)*

    Bach, Matthias (1991)

    Bartok, Giovan (1991)

    Bassmann, Lutz (1990)

    Bedobul, Kynthia (1988)

    Breughel, Anton (1975)

    Breughel, Istvan (1985)

    Campanini, Giuseppe (1988)

    Clementi, Maria (1975)

    Damtew, Oleg (1998)

    Dawkes, Ellen (1990)

    Domrowski, Monika (1998)

    Draeger, Manuela (2001)

    Echenguyen, Irena (1981)

    Echenguyen, Maria (1976)

    Fincke, Elia (1998)

    Garcia Muñoz, Maria (1985)

    Gardel, Wolfgang (1975)

    Gompo, Khrili (1980)

    Heier, Barbara (1991)

    Henkel, Maria (1980)

    Hinz, Mario (1998)

    Hoo, Rita (1992)

    Iguacel, Maria (1975)

    Khadjbakiro, Iakoub (1977)

    Khorassan, Jean (1996)

    Kim, Petra (1992)

    Kobayashi, Irina (1991)

    Koenig, Astrid (1990)

    Kronauer, Elli (1999)

    Kwoll, Maria (1975)

    Lethbridge, William (1992)

    Lukaszczyk, Vassilissa (1987)

    Malaysi, Jean (1979)

    Malter, Hugo (1990)

    Marachvili, Türkan (1992)

    Marconi, Ivo (1992)

    Mayayo, Erdogan (1998)

    Nachtigall, Roman (2000)

    Negrini, Anita (1977)

    Nordstrand, Verena (1986)

    Ossorguina, Raïa (1986)

    Ostiategui, Leonor (1996)

    Ostiategui, Pablo (1996)

    Peek, Marina (1998)

    Petrokian, Aram (1992)

    Pizarro, Hans-Jürgen (1998)

    Reddecliff, Dimitri (1990)

    Retsch, Dorothea (1975)

    Retzmayer, Rita (1979)

    Retzmayer, Zeev (1976)

    Samarkande, Maria (1978)

    Santander, Monika (1982)

    Sauerbaum, Maria (1996)

    Schnittke, Maria (1980)

    Schrag, Maria (1975)

    Schwack, Lilith (1979)

    Sherrad, Aidan (1990)

    Soledad, Irena (1977)

    Soudayeva, Maria (1975)

    Sternhagen, Julio (1975)

    Tarchalski, Yasar (1990)

    Thielmann, Maria Gabriella (1992)

    Thielmann, Ralf (1982)

    Velazquez, Sonia (2000)

    Vlassenko, Jean (1987)

    Wallinger, John (1991)

    Weingand, Anita (1986)

    Wernieri (1975)

    Wolff, Rebecca (2001)

    Wolguelam, Jean (1975)

    Zhang, Yann (1977)

    * Year in parentheses indicates date of incarceration at high-security sector.

    toilet bowl, asking for cell 1157, or on the bars of the window, saying Bassmann here . . . please respond . . . Bassmann is listening . . . please respond . . . Now he knocked nowhere. He concentrated his gaze on us, the photographs of those who had preceded him in disappearing, and he made the smallest of murmurs pass through his lips, pretending not to be dead and reproducing a whispering technique that the most tantric among us had many a time used in their romånces: with an audible exhalation, the narrator prolongs, not his or her own existence, but the existence of those who are going to dwindle into nothing, whose memory can only be preserved by the narrator. Word by word, moan after moan, Lutz Bassmann struggled to make last the mental edifice that would eventually become dust once again. His breath merged with the putrid sewers that wandered through the prison. He still tenuously held on to reality and he managed to keep together fragments. He managed to keep his voice from giving out again. So that for one hour more, two and a half hours, one more night, the worlds that we had built with swift carpentry and defended would persist. Mental edifice . . . Worlds . . . Swift carpentry . . . What is . . . Huh? I will respond. That is what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature, literature that was either written by hand or learned by heart and recited, as the administration through the years would sometimes forbid us any paper material; it was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies. This fight was now confined solely to Bassmann’s lips. It was suspended in a breath. As thirty years of incarceration had left his mind feeble, and reduced his creative spirit to scraps, his final murmurs no longer obeyed the logics of pioneers, combatants, oneiric footprints, or enthusiasm, without which the post-exoticist project had produced no more than two or three works. During his death throes, Lutz Bassmann’s only wish was to stir the embers that he had guarded, and not be absorbed too quickly along with them by the nothingness. But even before, at the beginning of the ten years, maybe because he estimated that the confidants were already unattainable or no longer existed, it seemed that he had lost his creative spark. His latest works, his final romanesque jolts, took shelter under rather unattractive and uninspired titles, such as To Know How to Rot, To Know How Not to Rot, or Structure of Deconstructed Obscurity, or Walk Through Childhood. These are narrative poems and Shaggås, supposedly compact pieces diluted into vast arrière-garde logorrheas that one can take no pleasure in reading. There are also romånces, such as About-Face Vandals, One Thousand Nine Hundred Seventy-Seven Years Before the World Revolution, and even The Mantis, but the brooding that inspired them has devolved into nothing communicable. Their encryption is vain, their undeniable beauty is vain, maybe simply because no one—no one is listening. No living being other than Lutz Bassmann is paying attention. In such works, the idea of connivance with the reader, so oily and so generously spread onto the clockwork of official literature, has been disregarded to even the smallest details. Here we have the terminal rumblings, the ultimate punctuated throaty rasps of post-exoticism . . . POST-EXOTICISM. That word again. Here again this heavy term. Around it we have circled, from the beginning, like vultures around a carcass. WHAT IS POST-EXOTICISM? An insolent question, very unwelcome on the day of Bassmann’s death, but its appearance here demonstrates that a half-century after Minor Angels, by Maria Clementi, sympathizers, on the outside, have not . . . Demonstrates that the incarcerated have been left alone. A symposium on post-exoticism was organized with Lutz Bassmann’s involvement before the ’00s of the twenty-first century, eighteen or nineteen years ago. It lived more or less in 1997. Beyond the walls of the prison, this must have been an age of hollow editorials, or of reflux toward what official literature itself considered the worst. Two popular chroniclers had been sent to us by a cultural magazine in general circulation, subsidized, I believe, by mafia industrialists in meat and construction. I say I, and I believe, but this is again just a matter of pure convention. The first-person singular serves to accompany the

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1