Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London.
Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Thea Petrou is an independent researcher based in London.

«Thinking Through Relation brings together an outstanding collection of essays that explore the diverse ways in which works of art and aesthetic experience generate a richness of relation which escapes the straightjackets of rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Clearly demonstrating the creative potential of critical writing, these essays are a fitting tribute to the creativity, originality and subtlety of Timothy Mathews¿s scholarly accomplishment and his contribution to our understanding of art and of the aesthetic relation.»
(Dr Ian James, University of Cambridge)

«This book in honour of Timothy Mathews is much more than a Festschrift. It is a collection of thought-provoking, daring insights into the crucial place of literature and the arts in our world and in our being human. It is an exhilarating multifarious demonstration of how creativity can undo, without for a moment losing intellectual rigour, the disciplinary and academic structures that constrain our thinking. Driven by curiosity and by care ¿ love, even ¿ the many contributions to the volume show, in their different ways, how criticism can be at its most effective by being at its most imaginative and its least predictable.»
(Professor Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, University of London)

This book is an offering. It contains eighteen essays in honour of Timothy Mathews, written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. These essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They advance fresh interpretations of some important figures in twentieth-century European culture ¿ Apollinaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Calvino, Dalí, Genet, Nooteboom, Roubaud ¿ using modes of reading that are both intellectually brave and open to fragility, intimate as well as critical, at once playful and earnest. They bring texts and artworks into relation in order to amply demonstrate that relation itself is a form of thinking.

Contents: Jenny Chamarette: Honour - Jane Fenoulhet: Hopscotch by Moonlight: Becoming- Child in Cees Nooteboom's
In the Dutch Mountains
- Tim Beasley- Murray: «Back to Life, Back to Reality»: From the Game of Academia to the Risk of Creative- Critical Writing - Patrick ffrench: Reasons Not to Move: Arguments Against Desire and Knowledge in Late Beckett - Johanna Malt: The Space- Time of the Surrealist Object - Mathelinda Nabugodi: On Method; or, Mary Shelley and I - Emily Orley: The Invisible Boundaries of the Moment: At a Distance and Through a Different Body - Martin Crowley: Shipless Ocean Letters - Florian Mussgnug: Waves - Clare Finburgh Delijani: Jean Genet and the Sanctuary of the Sea - Delphine Grass: Translating the Archives: An Autotheoretical Experiment - Helena Carvalhão Buescu and Florian Mussgnug: A View from the South: Identity and Plurality in Europe - Sharon Morris: The Contemporary Macaronic in Wales - Clive Scott: Developing Creative Models of Mind by «Translational» Practice: From Critical to Creative Translation - Jérôme Game: Art and Literature; or, On a More or Less Permeable Membrane: An Interview - Stephen M. Hart: Journeying Towards a Practice- Led Quantitative Analysis of Art - Thea Petrou: Collecting, Classifying and Composing: Art and Memory in Jacques Roubaud's
C
- Timothy Mathews: Encore.