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.