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You can also browse an archive of books published by program faculty and scholars.
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Recent News
May 24, 2023
Ph.D. in hand, longtime theater director starts a second act
A 2022 graduate turns from the stage to the lecture hall.
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May 1, 2023
Celebrating Graduate Center Scholars During AAPI Heritage Month
The Graduate Center recognizes the work of our alumni and faculty during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
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Apr 10, 2023
Two Faculty Members and an Alumna Win 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships
Professors Wayne Koestenbaum and Tanya Pollard and Alumna Deborah Lutz receive the prestigious fellowship.
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Apr 1, 2023
Reasons to Love Poetry This Poetry Month
Graduate Center poets and authors name their favorite poems and say what draws them to poetry.
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Recent Books
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The Animal of Existence
Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal — crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’ This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’
Jared Daniel Fagen is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center.
Published October 2022
Black Square Editions

Y Tu Mamá También
Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema.
Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and 'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment.
Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.
Published September 2022
British Film Institute

The Acoustic Self in English Modernism and Beyond
Writing Musically
By Zoltan Varga (Ph.D. '13, Comparative Literature)
Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self, exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics—the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk—arguing that these three modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices.
Published February 2022
Routledge