OUT OF PRINT, essays by Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Paperback, 200 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-61-5
$32.50 retail, 25.00 from publisher
In this new collection of recent essays, long-time editor of American Book Review Jeffrey R. Di Leo considers the notion of what, in this digital age, it means to be out of print (including its use as an implement of cancel culture), and by extension, what it means to be in print, which serves as a point of departure for a wide-ranging survey of literature, print culture, the publishing industry, and anything else that draws his attention. As a scholar and public intellectual who seemingly has read everything, and has thought deeply about everything he has read, Di Leo’s essays are a head-spinning, engaging, enlightening delight, conducting the reader around the world of letters, from Poe to Potter to (Karl) Popper and even into pop culture (Rolling Stones and David Bowie et.al.). No one will put this volume down without having learned something they never imagined knowing.
Praise for Jeffrey Di Leo & Out of Print
Art historian Howard Becker once pointed out that the museum whose floor can’t support two tons won’t be showing any two-ton sculptures. In his virtuoso Out of Print, Jeffrey R. Di Leo reveals how the nexus of publishing, theory, literature, and philosophy supports what we read, what we call literature, and some of the consequences for the life of thought as the book world goes through the greatest revolution since the invention of the printing press. Less of an explanation than a virtuoso performance of its ideas, the essays collected in Out of Print form one of the most insightful observations of the world of reading as it unfolds in real time around us.
—Steve Tomasula, author of Ascension
Di Leo is first of all, like all good thinkers, an indefatigable storyteller, able to breathe ideas into action on the stage. What he writes is often everyday tragedy masking as high comedy, for instance in his account in “Paperback Theory” of the rise and demise of theory through an analysis of intentionally “ill-made” books. But he is also that old-fashioned term, an interlocutor, or if you prefer, a conversationalist, or, more accurately, what the Greeks would have called a rhetor (ῥήτωρ) a term that one dictionary of etymology tellingly translates as an “artist of discourse.”
—Michael Joyce, author of the pioneering hypertext fiction, afternoon
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is an unusually versatile theoretically based critic of the contemporary scene. His vast editorial outreach and largesse make him a particularly rare quantity. It enables him to cross the frontier between erudite academic discourse into state-of-the-art cultural journalism. Out of Print is a welcome addition to his work on current breakdowns in the transmission of literate capabilities and values at U.S colleges and universities, in the publishing industry, and in the media. It is invariably witty, incisive, and authoritative in its multi-perspectival take on the U.S. publishing industry under the regime of neoliberal corporate management.
Out of Print is an important book. Meticulously and from a diversity of perspectives, lending it intellectual objectivity and authenticity, it pursues the sociopolitical impact—often manifestly absurd—of a priori controls applied to the expression, publication, and dissemination of ideas and positions, however controversial. Over the course of this guided tour through the current malaise, a host of incompatible players, from the sympatico to the unspeakable, falls prey to this condition, Dr. Seuss, Woody Allen, Josh Hawley, and Blake Bailey prominent among them.
Out of Print is the outgrowth of a lamentably polarized and dumbed-down public sphere and debate—a culture of cancellation, attack ads, conspiracy theories, and death threats. While focusing on current double-binds and absurdities surrounding the foundational democratic process of free and open publishing, Di Leo renders an indispensable political diagnosis of what ails U.S. and advanced technological cultures as a whole as they drift rudderless in the face of dire challenges and shortcomings.
—Henry Sussman, author of The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22
About the Author
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is a Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston–Victoria. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symplokē, editor-in-chief of the American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. Di Leo is a past member of the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly (Teaching as Profession), and is the former president of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts. He received a BA in Philosophy and Economics from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and an MA in Philosophy, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a dual PhD in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has taught at Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Di Leo was born and raised in Vineland, New Jersey. He lives in Victoria, Texas with his wife, Nina, and their two sons.