Lexington Books
Pages: 228
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-0282-5 • Hardback • November 2014 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
978-1-4985-0284-9 • Paperback • August 2016 • $51.99 • (£40.00)
978-1-4985-0283-2 • eBook • November 2014 • $49.00 • (£38.00)
Raj Chandarlapaty is assistant professor of English at the American University in Afghanistan.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
Photography, Music and Films of Paul Bowles: Media Representations and “Post” Anxieties
CHAPTER ONE, PHOTOGRAPHY: Paul Bowles and the Importance of Mystique in the Building of Literary Genius in “Post”-ed Times
Traveler, Mystic and American Heretic: Nutting’s Yesterday’s Perfume: Photographs of Paul and His Hypertexted Reintroduction to the American Literary Canon
Many Moroccos: Paul’s Proteges, His Environment, and “Post” Islam
How Could I Send a Picture Into The Desert? Paul Bowles and the Art of Decolonization
CHAPTER TWO, The Musical and Other Sound Recordings of Paul Bowles: Populism, Pop Reinventions of Folklore, and the Rise of Postmodern Alterity
Pupil, Composer and Critic: Paul Bowles, The Reticent Dean of Popular Music and the Archetype of Sound and Harmony
Meanings and Shared Communities: The Recordings of Moroccan Music and Tribal Religious Cults
Sound Recordings: Paul Bowles Reads A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard: Postmodern Stereotyping and the Myriad of Kiffed Possibilities
CHAPTER THREE, LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES, MUSIC AND “POST”-NESS OF THE VIDEO PRESENTATIONS OF PAUL BOWLES: Reinvention and Popularization of the Author and His Anxiety in “Post” Morocco
“You Are Not I” and “Baptism of Solitude,” Creative Restatements of Literary Modernism and the “Other”
Documentary Films on Paul Bowles: Revisiting the Anxiety of Authorship Through Conversations, Practices and Meditations
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky: Surrealism, Modernist Re-Invention, and Dialectical Writings of East-West Intertexts
Benoit Graffin’s Beach Café: The Metaphor of ‘Post’ Stereotypes and Historical Fantasies Communicating with Modern Geopolitics
Half Moon and Creating a Legend: Frieder Schlaich’s Re-Creation of the Maghrebi Architect
Conclusion: The Forecasting of Literary Genius
Works Cited
A remarkable expatriate American, Paul Bowles (1910–1999) has been thoroughly discussed as a writer. He is best known as the author of The Sheltering Sky (1949), a novel made into a brilliant film by Bernardo Bertolucci. Chandarlapaty looks at other dimensions of Bowles's fame. He was the subject of photo essays and documentary films, and he was a composer. He recorded Moroccan folk music. He inspired Beat writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who knew him in Tangier. He had an impact on rock music and jazz (the Rolling Stones were fans). Chandarlapaty writes in depth about this major cultural figure, someone deserving the overworked label icon. The research in this book is impressive in the light of Bowles's multidimensional talents. . . .This well-documented book—Chandarlapaty's heavy use of jargon notwithstanding—will serve as a good contribution to the discussion. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
Re-Creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination is perhaps the first significant full-length study of the artist's work since his death in 1999 and certainly the most comprehensive evaluation, to date, of Bowles' eclectic output.
— The Mailer Review
Raj Chandarlapaty’s strikingly probing analysis of Paul Bowles’ complicated amalgam of music and literature leads to stimulating new perspectives on colonial and postcolonial experience, particularly his intricate examination of deterritorialization. Post Chandarlapaty, Bowles can never again be read in an ideological confinement.
— Phillip Sipiora, University of South Florida
Chandarlapaty argues provocatively that Paul Bowles challenged literary modernism’s focus on isolation, alienation, and imposition of order and control, and offered instead an imagination-based outlook that rejects the world view of societies rooted in Western colonialism.
— Richard B. Schwartz