An
utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and
writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by
luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks
to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a
well-timed rehab to the word "pathetic"
"Literature is pathetic." So claims Eileen Myles in
their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature,
a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater
scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called
"pathetic" or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around
which lives are both built and undone. Myles first reclaimed the word
for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego
in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had
slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or
feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their
identification of "pathetic" as ripe for reinvention forms
the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106
contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser,
Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines
like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as
extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious
Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla
Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs
shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille
Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester
Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many
others, including Myles's own opening salvo of their 1992
presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and
uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on
literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained,
awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think
differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.