Decompositions - Essays on Art and Literature - Eric Basso

Decompositions: Essays on Art and Literature by Eric Basso / 186-page paperback from Asylum Arts Press, published in 2006 / ISBN 9781453855782 *** Decompositions collects all of Eric Basso's essays on art and literature in one volume. Basso takes us on a tour of bizarre literary landscapes and eccentric machines created by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Alfred Jarry. He explores Paul Valéry's brilliant subversion of philosophy and metaphysics in Monsieur Teste, and reveals the deathless apparition behind Maurice Blanchot's harrowing Death Sentence. The collection also contains illuminating, and diverting, pieces on Finnegans Wake, the French Romantics and Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur, a study of the unexpectedly elusive, and venomous, Céline, and moving biographical portraits of Goya, Gérard de Nerval and Theodore Gericault. In the pivotal essay, "Annihilation," Basso takes a short story by a forgotten Hungarian writer as the springboard to a searing dissection of Rembrandt and the p