Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous
Art Edited by Leora Lev Dennis Cooper
has been both praised and censured as the most controversial writer
working today for his creation of a searing, outlaw textuality
that charts psychosexual terrain uncensored by desire police. This
volume is the first to explore Cooper’s significance as a pioneering
literary artist who illuminates the hidden or repressed extremities
of the fin de millennium American zeitgeist. Leora Lev has assembled
a roster of internationally acclaimed scholars, fiction writers, filmmakers,
and artists who conjure a provocative encounter between Cooper’s fiction,
European transgressive literature and philosophy (e.g., Sade, Rimbaud,
Bataille, Bresson), and American psychocultural topographies. (Continued on back flap) |
(Continued from front flap)
and the challenges of an anarchic textuality that writes against both
the mainstream and “alternative” literary grains. About the Editor Leora Lev is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State College. She received her PhD in Romance Languages from Harvard. She has written essays on Spanish fiction, film, and culture and American avant-garde fiction, as well as journalism. Her essay on Matador appeared in Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, and she has published work in Spanish Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, Film Quarterly, American Book Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, the Boston Phoenix, and other publications. She lives in Boston. LC 2005023174 Jacket illustration: Dennis Cooper, by Robert Giard. Photo courtesy
of Jonathan Silin. |
Advance Praise for Enter at Your Own Risk
“Dennis Cooper’s sublime novels, poems, and stories have long been misunderstood
and underexposed. Now Leora Lev has compiled a long overdue collection of essays—all
written by an amazing bunch of Cooper’s contemporary novelists and critics—that
show the writer as he truly is: one of the planet’s most original, devastating,
visionary, and crucial literary icons. Enter at Your Own Risk is a knockout
book.”
--Scott Heim,
Author of Mysterious Skin (made into a 2005 film by Gregg Araki), In
Awe, and
We Disappear
Contributors: James Annesley, Dodie Bellamy, Lawrence Brose, William S. Burroughs (edited by James Grauerholz), Michael Cunningham, Robert Glück, Earl Jackson, Jr., Kevin Killian, Leora Lev, Matthew Stadler, Brandon Stosuy, Marvin Taylor, John Waters, and Elizabeth Young
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/fdupress.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sponsored by University College Cork and the Granary Theater
April 8, 2006
ON: Dennis Cooper