Alan Singer explores the intricate ligatures among brutality, art, artifice, taste, bliss, and the disease of consciousness called selfhood. The virtuoso of avant-decadence

Alan Singer, The Inquisitor's Tongue: A Novel, Fiction Collective 2, 2012.

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"Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities.
The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity.
In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity."

“Beautifully erudite, ornate, and appalling, The Inquisitor’s Tongue’s doublehelixed narrative explores the intricate ligatures among brutality, art, artifice, taste, bliss, and the disease of consciousness called selfhood, proving once again that Alan Singer is the virtuoso of avant-decadence.”—Lance Olsen

Alan Singer, Dirtmouth, Fiction Collective 2, 2004.

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"A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly murder of a young woman on Blackman's Heath, an ancient execution site in the Irish bogs. A pair of archaeologists, the obese and decadent Kraft Dundeed and his furious protégé, Roscoe Taste, each contest the other's self-justifying account of the crime while professing passionate love for the victim. Two silences frame their quarrel: Cinna McDermond, the brutalized subject of her lovers' confessions, and a nameless Investigator, whose invisible presence embodies the reader. Against this background of subterranean savagery, the competing monologues struggle to unearth a violence that neither can fully remember nor forget.
Dirtmouth is the third in a triad of novels by Alan Singer which investigate the entanglements of memory, self, and duplicitous will. As in Singer's Memory Wax and The Charnel Imp, Dirtmouth's luxuriant prose enacts its narrators' labyrinthine rationalizations, entangling action in grotesque imagery and dark insinuation, much as Blackman's Heath engulfs its Bronze Age victims. Singer's writing recalls the stylistic virtuosity of John Hawkes and Djuna Barnes and the obsessive ruminations of Beckett's and Poe's narrators. Drawing readers into an interrogation room as vast and constricted as the mind, Dirtmouth explores the archaeology of passion, exhuming crimes that mirror our own."

"Like William Goyen's The House of Breath or Beckett's Play, Singer's Dirtmouth's voices flutter purgatorially somewhere between life and death. But while Goyen offers the ghostly and weightless consolation of both memory and air, Singer's voices here are weighty as earth and as the crimes they have committed, the sentences as substantial and as carefully articulated as preserved bodies. Dirthmouth is a compelling and perfectly rendered meditation on the dark struggle between memory and forgetting." - Brian Evenson

"In Alan Singer’s fourth novel, Dirtmouth, an anonymous investigator listens to the self-serving testimonies of Kraft Dundeed, a corpulent and abrasive archeologist, and Roscoe Taste, his former disciple. “Without memory I am immune to loss,” Dundeed declares, yet throughout the novel the forensic detective’s investigation of Cinna McDermond’s brutal murder reveals traces of the sinister secrets buried amid the bog waters of Blackman’s Heath, Dundeed’s hereditary estate. As each speaker recollects the exhumation of the ancient execution grounds that once occupied the Heath, readers witness the thrilling discovery of Dirtmouth, Dundeed’s first major archeological find; nearly fifty years later, Taste begins to insinuate that the discovery was a calculated scientific hoax. As the novel unfolds, the opposed monologues of the mentor and his student betray these “co-conspirators in the story” as grotesque doppelgängers, “partners in the performance.” Singer’s archeological inventory details the “curious intimacy” of excavation, as each man fervidly declares his abject passion for Cinna and accuses the other of victimizing her. An intelligent and relentless conflict between old age and youth, silence and speech, truth and deception, guilt and innocence, the compelling voices of Dirtmouth permeate this unusual and darkly claustrophobic book. Although both narrators are prone to purple passages, the texture of Singer’s Gothic prose remains one of the novel’s strengths. Submerged in our inability to recapture what is lost, event and interpretation blur across “memory’s proximity to the things of the present.” - Trey Strecker

Alan Singer, Memory Wax, Fiction Collective 2, 1996.

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"...extraordinary...a vision reminiscent of John Hawkes and Faulkner before him...hard work on the reader's part, which will pay him or her back in a wide, wondrous wealth." - American Book Review

"The newest novel from Singer, literary critic and author of The Ox-Breadth and The Charnel Imp, is full of well-turned phrases and strikingly subtle sentences that make it a beautiful exercise in description. Unfortunately, that is all it is. In it, Singer details the story of Delta Tells, gypsy-esque midwife and spouse of Brainard Tells, wayward husband extraordinaire. The opening lines, perhaps the only straightforward prose in the book, recount how Delta, in a calculated act of revenge, serves a carefully prepared meal, then tells her husband he has eaten his own newborn child. After this incident, entire pages are devoted to defecation, regurgitation, and all the other biological functions that inevitably follow. If the writing is gruesomely exquisite, the book is nonetheless disappointing. It epitomizes "prosaic," and all its metaphors and highly descriptive passages serve no purpose except to mask a shallow tale. The unrelenting broidery that sacrifices everything to the belle phrase will make one appreciate the simplicity of the blunt. Readers will come away thinking that Singer's name is worth remembering, even if Memory Wax is not." - Publishers Weekly

Alan Singer, The Charnel Imp, Fiction Collective 2, 1988.

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Alan Singer, The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

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"Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remain steeped in disagreement and controversy. In The Self-Deceiving Muse, Alan Singer proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of self-deception. Singer asserts that self-deception, far from being irrational, is critical to our capacity to be acute "noticers" of our experience. The book demonstrates how self-deception can be both a resource for rational activity generally and, more specifically, a prompt to aesthetic innovation. It thereby provides new insights into the ways in which our imaginative powers bear on art and life. The implications-philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical-of such a proposition indicate the broadly interdisciplinary thrust of this work, which incorporates "readings" of novels, paintings, films, and video art."

Alan Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

"In recent years the category of the aesthetic has been judged inadequate to the tasks of literary criticism. It has been attacked for promoting class-based ideologies of distinction, for cultivating political apathy, and for indulging irrational sensuous decadence. Aesthetic Reason reexamines the history of aesthetic theorizing that has led to this critical alienation from works of art and proposes an alternative view. The book is a defense of the relevance and usefulness of the aesthetic as a cognitive resource of human experience. It challenges the contemporary critical tendency to treat aesthetic value as separate from the realms of human agency and sociopolitical change."

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Alan Singer, The Subject As Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics, Univ of Michigan Press, 1994.

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"In The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics, Alan Singer posits "narrative aesthetics" as a crucial link between post Enlightenment philosophical skepticism about human subjectivity and literary-theoretical skepticism about the autonomy of the text or artwork. Observing a vital complementarity between the narrative and the aesthetic (two realms often alienated from each other), Singer argues for the relevance of narrative logic to the critique of post-Cartesian subjectivity. Reciprocally, he demonstrates the relevance of rational norms of human agency to the study of narrative art. On one hand, Singer wants to salvage the critique of the subject from the metaphysical abstraction of idealist philosophies. On the other hand, he wants to save literary narrative from the ahistoricism and apoliticism to which it is often consigned. Each chapter juxtaposes a set of philosophical arguments about the dynamics of human agency with close readings of narrative literature. Rather than sketch a historical overview of Western narrative, Singer focuses on formal innovations that give a strong theoretical warrant for linking narrative to the realm of human action. Singer examines aesthetic theories in the works of Aristotle, Baumgarten, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Sartre, Adorno, and Goodman as they converge with the goals of social theories espoused by Schutz, Lukacs, Althusser, Foucault, and Giddens. The philosophical arguments are then mapped onto a literary tradition through examination of texts by Thomas Nashe, Laurence Sterne, Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, William Gaddis, and John Ashbery. Alan Singer asserts that "narrative aesthetics" must be used as a critical tool in ultimately resolving the current conflict between postmodern aestheticists, such as Lyotard, and anti-aesthetic communitarian ethicists, such as Habermas, who posit the realms of the aesthetic and the political as mutually exclusive. The Subject as Action will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relation of narrative art to the spectrum of literary and philosophical theories that seek to define the human subject in modern culture."

"In this original and groundbreaking study, Alan Singer posits "narrative aesthetics" as a link between philosophical skepticism about the status of human subjectivity and literary theoretical skepticism about the autonomy of the text. By observing the complementarity between narrative and the aesthetic, Singer argues for the relevance of narrative logic to the critique of post-Cartesian subjectivity.
Each chapter juxtaposes a set of philosophical arguments about the dynamics of human agency with a close reading of stylistic innovations in narrative literature. The author focuses on formal innovations that give a strong theoretical warrant for linking narrative to the realm of human action. The book demonstrates aesthetic theory in the works of Aristotle, Baumgarten, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Sartre, Adorno, and Goodman to be convergent with the goals of social theory espoused in the works of Schutz, Lukács, Althusser, Foucault, and Giddens. This philosophical tradition is traced in texts by Thomas Nashe, Laurence Stern, Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, William Gaddis, and John Ashbery.
The Subject as Action concludes by asserting the usefulness of narrative aesthetics in resolving the current conflict between postmodern aestheticists like Jean-François Lyotard and anti-aesthetic communitarian ethicists like Jürgen Habermas, for whom the realms of the aesthetic and the political otherwise remain mutually exclusive possibilities.
"Singer's work at one stroke stops and reverses narratology's drift of decades away from truly searching inquiry into the place of actions and events in narrative. . . . a rare academic book because it does not cheapen either the demands or the dignity of intellectual labor, and because it fully rewards both." - Robert Caserio

Alan Singer, A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discourse and Discontinuity in the Modern Novel, Univ Press of Florida, 1984.