Ekbert Faas
Background
An avid traveller, Faas hitchhiked throughout Europe and North Africa in his mid-teens and has kept up his globe-trotting ever since. During his student years, he lived, worked and studied in Munich, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Rome and London. A full Professor of English Literature after completing two Ph.Ds (Dr. phil. and Dr. habil.), Ekbert Faas left Europe to restart his career under a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in New York City. A biographer, translator, novelist, critic, literary historian, and interdisciplinary scholar, he has had a lifelong interest in poetics, and especially in evolving a new aesthetics based on cognitive science and evolutionary theory. A recent result of these endeavours, The Survival of Beauty and Art (c.300pp.), has been submitted for publication. Since his highly acclaimed Woyzeck's Head appeared in 1991, he has also continued his work as a novelist. His diaries, started at age 15, and by now counting 150 volumes, have served him as a major quarry in his creative endeavours.
Major Publications, Critical Summaries and Appraisals
Shakespeare’s Poetics (263pp) Cambridge University Press, 1986. Paperback Re-Issue 2010.
"Mr Faas's learned, humane book should be read and re-read by everyone interested in poetics,
Shakespeare, or the Renaissance.” (T.H. Howard-Hill, Review of English Studies, 38,
151, 1987, 386-87)
The Genealogy of Aesthetics (450 pp) Cambridge University Press, 2002.
"Well written, polemical, and thought-provoking, this engaged examination of the mainstream
of western thinking about art and beauty deserves thoughtful readers"
(Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics, 61, 2, December 2007, 412-13)
Robert Creeley: A Biography (516 pp), by Ekbert Faas with Maria Trombacco, McGill-Queen’s University Press (Canada) and University of New England Press (US), 2001.
"Ekbert Faas's account of Creeley's life is immensely readable, phrased in something of the
accelerated, demotic style - half scholarly, half journalistic - practised by Greil Marcus in
Lipstick Traces."(Eric Miller, Canadian Review of Books, 31, 2, 2002, 20-22)
Woyzeck’s Head (270pp) Cormorant Books, 1991; LaTêtede Woyzeck (253 pp) translated by Marie-Claude Fournier-Plowiecka, éditions Marie Plowiecka, Paris, 1995.
“A maniacally masterful mind game disguised as a novel - ambitious, exhilarating ... the most
intellectual fun I’ve had since Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. It operates on so many
levels: literary, historical and philosophical.”
(Eve Drobot, Globe and Mail, September 28, 1991)
Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence 1953-1978(312pp), edited by Ekbert Faas and Sabrina Reed, McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.
"The editors have done an admirable job of scholarship."
(George Bowering, Globe and Mail, September 1, 1990)
Retreat into the Mind. Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry (312pp) Princeton University Press, 1988 (Paperback Edition, 1991).
"Retreat into the Mind is a splendid book worthy of praise and congratulation ... Excellent."
(G.S. Rousseau, Isis, 83, 3, 1991, 581-82)
Shakespeare’s Poetics (263pp) Cambridge University Press, 1986.
"Faas demonstrates that Shakespeare, like Montaigne and Bacon, espouses an antiessentialist
poetic, rejecting the orthodoxies of his day and dissolving the traditional dichotomy between
art and nature. For Shakespeare, Faas argues, imagination dictates to reason throughout the
creative process, celebrating not the truth behind things, but the final, mysterious reality of
a nature forever in flux … thoroughly researched, massively documented and painstakingly indexed
… serious students (i.e.: graduate and upper division undergraduate) will want to review the
evidence Faas amasses. (D.O. Dickerson, Choice, November 1986)"
Kenneth Rexroth. Excerpts from a Life. Edited, with a foreword by Ekbert Faas (61pp) Santa Barbara: Conjunctions, 1981. An edition of the second volume of Kenneth Rexroth’s autobiography.
Tragedy and After: Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe (250pp) McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986.
"Tragedy and After is a penetrating study of a genre still widely read. Indexed and fully
documented, it merits the attention of scholars and readers of tragedy and inclusion among
undergraduate and graduate collections devoted to dramatic theory.”
(W.W. Waring, Choice, January 1985, 124)
Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society (361pp) Black Sparrow Press, 1984.
"I rank [Young Robert Duncan] among the top two or three literary biographies I have read ... terrific ... "
(William Everson,Modern American Poetry, March 1988)
Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, with Selected Critical Writings by Ted Hughes and Two Interviews (230pp) Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
"His description of Hughes’s reading, and his charting of Hughes’s development, is illuminating
and helpful.” (J.R. Watson, Yearbook of English Studies, 13, 1983, 363-364)
Towards a New American Poetics (296pp) Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
"the book is bound to become a classic.” (Small Press Review, 10, 10-11, 69-70, Oct-Nov 1978)
Offene Formen. Zur Entstehung einer neuen Ästhetik (Open Forms: About the Emergence of a New Aesthetics) (197pp) Munich, Goldmann Verlag, 1975.
[Translated from the German]: "The high standards of this important study are reflected in the care
and attention which the author devoted to his scholarly references and indices."
(Siegfried Borris, Musik und Bildung, 1977)
Poesie als Psychogramm. Die dramatisch-monologische Versdichtung im viktorianischen Zeitalter (The Dramatic Monologue in the Victorian Era)(228pp) Munich, Fink Verlag, 1974
[Translation from the German]: "Faas has unearthed a lot of contemporary Victorian criticism,
innumerable reviews and other writings in the areas of psychology, philosophy and bistoriography."
(W.G. Müller, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 1975, 100-102)
Der Gedankenfuchs (The Thought Fox), translations of selected poems by Ted Hughes, by Ekbert Faas with Martin Seletsky, ed. W. Höllerer (69pp) Berlin, LCB Editionen, 1971.