The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Response, Reappraisal, and Rediscovery

The Contemporary Leonard Cohen is an exciting new study that offers an original explanation of Leonard Cohen’s staying power and his various positions in music, literature, and art.

The death of Leonard Cohen received media attention across the globe, and this international star remains dear to the hearts of many fans. This book examines the diversity of Cohen’s art in the wake of his death, positioning him as a contemporary, multi-media artist whose career was framed by the twentieth-century and neoliberal contexts of its production. The authors borrow the idea of ＂the contemporary＂ especially from philosophy and art history, applying it to Cohen for the first time--not only to the drawings that he included in some of his books but also to his songs, poems, and novels. This idea helps us to understand Cohen’s techniques after his postmodern experiments with poems and novels in the 1960s and 1970s. It also helps us to see how his most recent songs, poems, and drawings developed out of that earlier material, including earlier connections to other writers and musicians.

Philosophically, ＂the contemporary＂ also sounds out the deep feelings that Cohen’s work still generates in readers and listeners. Whether these feelings are spiritual or secular, sincere or ironic, we get them partly from the sense of timeliness and the sense of timelessness in Cohen’s lyrics and images, which speak to our own lives and times, our own struggles and survival. From a set of international collaborators, The Contemporary Leonard Cohen delivers an appreciative but critical examination of one of our dark luminaries.

Kait Pinder is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University. Her recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The University of Toronto Quarterly.
Joel Deshaye is a professor at Memorial University. His move to the East Coast stimulated his writing of The American Western in Canadian Literature (forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press). His first book was The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980 (2013), which focused partly on Cohen.