Background

An avid traveller, Faas hitchhiked throughout Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 and North Africa

North Africa

North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

 in his mid-teens and has kept up his globe-trotting ever since. During his student years, he lived, worked and studied in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

, Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

, Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 and London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. 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

American Council of Learned Societies

The American Council of Learned Societies , founded in 1919, is a private nonprofit federation of seventy scholarly organizations.ACLS is best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awards. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. 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

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 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; La Tête de 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.