Poetry. Leslie Scalapino writes: "Is DEMOSTHENES' LEGACY a translation of a real Demosthenes or his words or is it, as the impossibility of translation, fiction creating a character? Just as the word 'kinesthesia' translates the sensation of movement (as if the word translates 'muscle sense'), Jonathan Monroe's fragments in DEMOSTHENES' LEGACY are, as only immediate events, 'Nobody's narrative, no one's dream.' The assembled fragments are Monroe's comparison to modern media? Monroe's playful text is a virtual 'muscle sense' of the nature of event at all: 'Webs released in matching threads.'"

Author Hometown: ITHACA, NY USA



About the author: Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he is a former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, he has been a recipient of fellowships from the DAAD and ACLS and has served as a member of the Institute for International Education's Fulbright selection committee for creative writing as well as of the steering committee for Cornell's Institute for German Cultural Studies. His current project, following recent work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the Caribbean, focuses on postcoloniality, globalization, and contemporary poetry and poetics of the Americas.