Table of Contents

Contents


Foreword: The Chrysanthemum and the Flame Thrower
Larry McCaffery

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Lonely Atoms
Christopher K. Coffman

I. Engaging People, Space and Place

Chapter 1: Egalitarian Longings: The Problem with Pity and the Search for Equality in Poor People
Aaron D. Chandler

Interchapter: The World According to William T. Vollmann
Heather Corcoran

Chapter 2: The Poetics and Politics of Zoning, Mythography, and Mestizo Space in Imperial Michael K. Walonen

Interchapter: Vollmann in Russia: On Poor People
Mariya Gusev

Chapter 3: William T. Vollmann’s Search for Truth and Community in Participative Research
Georg Bauer

Intechapter: Palm Trees
Michael Glawogger

II. Engaging Narratives: History, Historiography, Ethics

Chapter 4: Vollmann’s Argall-Text: Neo-Elizabethan Form and the Literalist Past in Seven Dreams
Buell Wisner

Interchapter: Vollmann between the Covers
Carla Bolte

Chapter 5: Writing Europe: Death, History, and the Intersecting Intellectual Worlds of William T. Vollmann and Danilo Kiš
John K. Cox

Chapter 6: Kurt Gerstein and the Tragic Parable of ‘Clean Hands’: The Imaginative Role of Fiction in the Moral Calculus of William T. VollmannBryan M. Santin

Interchapter: Reading Rising Up and Rising Down
James Franco

Chapter 7: The New Universalism and William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down
Okla Elliott

III. Power, Sex, Politics

Chapter 8: Our Oriental Heritage: Seeking the Postcolonial Postmodern in William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels
Miles Liebtag

Interchapter : Piss Lime Vitriol
Jordan A. Rothacker

Chapter 9: William T. Vollmann’s Paradigms of Power
Joshua C. Jensen

Interchapter: The Shattered Object: On Representation versus Self-Representation and Becoming Whole
Melissa Petro

Chapter 10: ‘Strange Hungers’: William T. Vollmann’s Literary Performances of Abject Masculinity
Daniel Lukes

Interchapter: A Friendship
Jonathan Franzen

IV. Methods and Mores: Texts, Paratexts, Aesthetics

Interchapter: William T. Vollmann: Artist’s Books
Priscilla Juvelis

Chapter 11: Imperial Photography
Françoise Palleau-Papin

Interchapter: Against All Loss: On Kissing the Mask
Mary Austin Speaker

Chapter 12: The Ethics of the Archive and the William T. Vollmann Collection
Geoffrey D. Smith

Afterword: Beyond the Book: William T. Vollmann’s End Matter (Appendices, Glossaries and Extra Texts)
Michael Hemmingson

Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

About the Author

Christopher K. Coffman is a lecturer in humanities at Boston University.

Daniel Lukes has a PhD in comparative literature from New York University.

Reviews

Readers need a companion to sift through his [Vollmann's] range of materials and its relationship to style. . . .This critical companion is significant for a number of reasons. First, it makes the world a little less lonesome. Readers of Vollmann now have a book that can be found in the library that will offer them the silent conversation of academic discourse. Too often the academic world is purely professional, but for many it can be a place to connect with other likeminded individuals. This book is the starting point for learning and relationships, to say nothing of careers. Second, this book will help readers form a more nuanced understanding of Vollmann’s work, to look beyond superficial understandings of his public persona and to instead gaze deeply into the man and his work.
*Hysterical Realism*

William T. Vollmann is the elephant in the room of contemporary American letters, and in this imaginatively organized and edited collection over a dozen academic experts and a few fans and collaborators lay hold of various parts of this literary elephant and describe for us what they’ve found: Vollmann as participant observer, as moral philosopher, as historical novelist, as photographer, as punk; Vollmann and space, and postcolonialism, and sex work, and the archive. Unlike the blind men in the parable, however, they recognize that Vollmann is bigger than the sum of his many parts. A uniquely valuable collection of essays on a writer who deserves and repays all the attention we can give him.
*Brian McHale, Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor at The Ohio State University, Author of "Postmodernist Fiction" (1987) and "The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism" (2015)*

This is a fascinating collection of essays and observations about Vollmann's work and Vollmann the human. It's passionate, wildly eclectic, brilliant and frequently strange -- all the things a book about Vollmann should be.
*Dave Eggers, Publisher, Rising Up and Rising Down*