Meditations on disorder (defined as what comes into conflict or resists a prevailing order's sense of social advance and historical development) through a variety of voices, most associated with literary theory or, more broadly, with cultural critique. The meditations are shaped from both extraliterary (i.e. physics, biology, neuroscience, geometry, geography, psychoanalysis, politics, and history) and literary contexts. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bakhtin and Voloshinov argued that dialogue is the intersubjective basis of consciousness, and of the creativity which makes historical changes in consciousness possible. The multiple dialogical relationships give every subject, who has developed through internalising them, the potential to distance him or herself from them. Consciousness is therefore an “unfinalised” process, always open to a possible future which would not merely reiterate the past. But this book explores its corollary: The relative openness is a field of conflict where rival discourses struggle for hegemony, by subordinating or eliminating their rivals. That is how the unconscious is created out of socio-historical conflicts. Hegemony is always incomplete, because there is always the possibility of a return of its repressed rivals in new combinations.

Translating Apollinaire delves into Apollinaire’s poetry and poetics through the challenges and invitations it offers to the process of translation. Besides providing a new appraisal of Apollinaire, the most significant French poet of WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that translation’s primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of writing those responses into the act of translation. Every reader is invited to translate, and to translate with a creativity appropriate to the complexity of their own reading experiences. Throughout, Scott himself consistently uses the creative resource of photography, and more particularly photographic fragments, as a cross-media language used to help capture the activity of the reading consciousness.