Solo books by Marella Hoffman

Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities

A worldwide survey of the subject and a hands-on manual for university courses, public service professionals and NGOs. For sale at Routledge and Amazon now.

Read an extract here

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Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs

A manual and guide for academic courses and for professionals in government and NGOs, with detailed case studies from around the world. Draws on the author's fifteen years of practice at involving communities in shaping public policy. Published by Routledge across the English-speaking world in October 2017.         

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Savoir-faire des Anciens, Hier et Demain

Ethnographic study of a French Mediterranean village. Two-year collaboration with an amazing 88-year-old hunter, shepherd and wine-grower, Monsieur René Marty (right). 170 pages. Written in French, published by Cahiers de la Salce, France, 2016. Sold out. 

Cliquez ici pour entendre la voix de René Marty qui raconte des anecdotes du livre Savoir-faire des Anciens - Un village des Corbières Maritimes, hier et demain        Lire un extrait du livre (en français)  

Read an extract (English translation) 

The English-language version - Wisdom of the Elders, Learning Ecology in a French Mediterranean Village - will be published and widely available in 2021. An Introduction from Dr Mark Singleton of the London School of Economics will show the urgency of applying Monsieur Marty's principles in our own twenty-first century lives, wherever we are. And practical self-help tools show readers how to apply this grounded ecological wisdom hands-on as part of their own lifestyle, whether in town or country.  

The Fleurs Trilogy

A trilogy of literary criticism on the nineteenth-century Paris of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Written while a Visiting Scholar at King's College, Cambridge University. Adaptations of a PhD thesis. Second edition, Cambridge Editions, 2020 

Vol 1, Que J’Aime Voir ~ Eyes and Gazing in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal

This study reviews the existing bibliography on the subject, assessing the phenomenological, psychoanalytic, feminist and socio-political approaches to the gaze in Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris. It goes on to reveal the Fleurs du Mal city as an autoscopic topography - an optical metropolis where gazes are stacked vertically from ground-level to sky-level. Poems’ characters form an intersecting network of gazers, each making their own optical reception of their environment. Forced to peruse the self-conscious poses of models and statues around the city, the reader’s eye too is reflected back at itself from within the poems. This is the first complete study of these meta-gazes that the poems arrange reflexively inside and around themselves. It reveals the enthusiastic myopia - the voracious appetite for visual detail and obsessively close-up seeing - in the poems. This wilful, aestheticised myopia lets them reify others’ eyes as inert bijouterie studded decoratively into the texts. Other gazes avert away into stunning displays that flick between the lilliputian, gigantesque and hallucinogenic. Using concepts like scopophilia panopticism and the optical metropolis, Que J’Aime Voir brings new keys that unlock the visual complexity and delights in Les Fleurs du Mal.

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Vol 2, Battant Les Murs ~ Spaces and Places in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal

A comprehensive study of place and space in Les Fleurs du Mal, the first to map all the diverse sites and locations of the book’s topography. It reviews the existing bibliography on the subject, as well as the cultural and socio-political context of place in Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris. It goes on to reveal how his poems perform their own appropriations of space and place. They showcase places from the street to the boudoir, the tropical island to the grave. Entire poems are dedicated to claustrophobic chambers, to agrophobic freefalls through space, or to tiny, decorative boxes and bottles containing imaginative worlds. Battant les Murs reveals the array of spatial dialectics that the poems perform around these tropes of place. The study traces the poems’ scriptural map-making, their virtual worlds, and the writing-desk that they position at the very heart of their city. Their labyrinth of ambivalent enclosures become fertile production-sites for writing, as well as geomorphic metaphors for the poet’s self. Battant les Murs demonstrates how the poems’ spaces and places are linked by a great ballet of kinetic displacements. Reviewing their many walks and strolls, flights and falls, daydreams, night-dreams, intoxications and incursions, it shows how these shift poems from one location to another, often making this act of travelling their central focus. The study reveals how the poems operate their masterful juggling of sites and kinetics in a repertoire of movement-styles through which the characters either master, or are themselves mastered by, space.

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Vol 3, Son Mouchoir et Ses Gants ~ Objects, collections and commodities in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal 

The first comprehensive study of objects, reification and commodities in Les Fleurs du Mal. Reviewing the existing bibliography on the subject, this study assesses its phenomenological, psychoanalytic and political approaches, as well as the cultural and socio-political context of Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris. It shows how ownership of objects - from art-works, ornaments and furnishings to the props of the personal toilette - is constantly achieved and displayed in his poems. We see that body-parts, jewellery, ornaments, furniture, clothes, household objects, treasures and currency are all lavishly foregrounded as objects in the poems. The poems present a complex circuitry of dynamics and permissions around this valuing, production and reception of objects - around desire for and access to them. Anatomy and body parts, in particular, are both the source and object of craven appetites in the texts. Son Mouchoir et ses Gants shows how the poems frame the body as a marionette, a machine, a work of art, and an object of contagion. The study also provides a unique exploration of both the interior and outdoor décor with which the poems are self-consciously furnished. It shows how they position this décor to frame transactions and dynamics in the poems. And it reveals how some poems even present their own very words - their verbal texture - as a material treasure equivalent in value to economic currency.

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In books with others

Territoires de l'Eau. The anthropology and phenomenology of water, especially in cultures that are surrounded by it. Bilingual, published by Cahiers de la Salce, France, 2014

Read an extract

Western Buddhist Poetry, Windhorse Press, 1998
Texts on being a meditator in the western world

A Century of Scholarship, National University of Ireland Press, 2008
Anthology about award-winning academics, including a section on the work of MH

Book by Dr. Richard Hoffman