Contemporary Experimental Literature
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Constructing Transgression: Criminality in Experimental Literature
University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2019 CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE Charles Kell University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Kell, Charles, "CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE" (2019). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 888. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/888 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE BY CHARLES KELL A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2019 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF CHARLES KELL APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Peter Covino Ryan Trimm Eske Møllgaard Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2019 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines integral, challenging contemporary poetry and fiction, and its relationship to notions of the criminal in multiple guises. The present focus on “criminal” excavates not only its literal meaning—the nature of crime, and its specific relation to penal law—but also brings to light how the “criminal” affects the construction of fiction and poetry, and the lives of various individuals (speakers) within the chosen texts. Intricately tied with the criminal are practices that transgress, and this study will also locate specific creations where poets and novelists construct transgressions that challenge contemporary ideas of narrative and poetic modes. -
The Internet As Playground and Factory November 12–14, 2009 at the New School, New York City
FIRST IN A SERIES OF BIENNIAL CONFERENCES ABOUT THE POLITICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY NOVEMBER 12–14, 2009 AT THE NEW SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY www.digitallabor.org The conference is sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University’s Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine. Acknowledgements General Event Support Lula Brown, Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Conference Director Patrick Fannon, Keith Higgons, Geoff Trebor Scholz Kim, Ellen-Maria Leijonhufvud, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Lindsey Medeiros, Executive Conference Production Farah Momin, Heather Potts, Katharine Trebor Scholz, Larry Jackson Relth, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Ndelea Simama, Andre Singleton, Lisa Conference Production Taber, Yamberlie Tavarez, Brandon Tonner- Deepthie Welaratna, Farah Momin, Connolly, Jolita Valakaite, Cynthia Wang, Julia P. Carrillo Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Production of Video Series Voices from Registration Staff The Internet as Playground and Factory Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Keith Higgons, Assal Ghawami Geoff Kim, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Overture Video Lindsey Medeiros, Heather Potts, Jesse Assal Ghawami Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Andre Singleton, Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Video -
Defamiliarization: Flarf, Conceptual Writing, and Using Flawed Software Tools As Creative Partners Richard P. Gabriel*
Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal, Vol.4, No.2. 134 Defamiliarization: Flarf, conceptual writing, and using flawed software tools as creative partners Richard P. Gabriel* IBM Research 3636 Altamont Way, Redwood City CA 94062, USA E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: One form of creativity uses defamiliarization, a mechanism that frees the brain from its rational shackles and permits the abducing brain to run free. Mistakes and flaws in several software tools are shown to be the starting points for increased creativity and better art, and a theory explaining the phenomenon is proposed. Keywords: Writing; Poetry; Creativity; Flarf Biographical notes: Richard P. Gabriel received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 1998. He has been a researcher at Stanford University, company president and Chief Technical Officer at Lucid, Inc., vice president of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk, a management consultant for several startups, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is an ACM Fellow. He is a researcher at IBM Research, looking into the architecture, design, and implementation of extraordinarily large, self-sustaining systems as well as development techniques for building them. Until recently he was President of the Hillside Group, a nonprofit that nurtures the software patterns community by holding conferences, publishing books, -
A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879
A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 by Natalia Aki Cecire A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor C. D. Blanton, chair Professor Lyn Hejinian Professor Mark Goble Professor Suzanne Guerlac Fall 2010 A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 © 2010 by Natalia Aki Cecire 1 Abstract A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 by Natalia Aki Cecire Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor C. D. Blanton, Chair This American literature dissertation offers an account of the critical category of “experimental literature,” arguing that, nebulous as the term appears to be, it is rooted in ideas of scientific experiment that were under debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While experimental literature is often described in terms of “formal innovation,” this dissertation reads literary form not as an autonomous category in its own right but as an indicator of epistemological investments. Borrowing Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s concept of the “epistemic virtue,” this dissertation argues that experimental literature seeks to produce a “sense of the real,” not by thematically treating scientific ideas or even by emulating scientific methods, but rather by using literary form to negotiate the changing landscape of what constituted scientificity in the first place. Epistemic virtues are the investments, at once methodological and ethical, that define the experimental mode. Experimental authors, this dissertation argues, seek ways for literature to produce knowledge with strong epistemic guarantees. -
Conceptualisms, Old and New Marjorie Perloff Before Conceptual Art Became Prominent in the Late 1960S, There Was Already, So
Conceptualisms, Old and New Marjorie Perloff Before conceptual art became prominent in the late 1960s, there was already, so Craig Dworkin has suggested in his “Anthology of Conceptual Writing” for Ubu Web (http://www.ubu.com/), a form of writing identifiable as conceptual poetry, although that term was not normally used to discuss the chance-generated texts of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low or the “word events” of George Brecht and La Monte Young. In his Introduction to the Ubu Web anthology, Dworkin makes an interesting case for a “non- expressive poetry,” “a poetry of intellect rather than emotion,” in which “the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with [Wordsworth’s] ‘spontaneous overflow [ of powerful feelings]’ supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process.” The first poet in Dworkin’s alphabetically arranged anthology of conceptual writing is Vito Acconci, whose early “poetry,” most of it previously unpublished, has now been edited and assembled, again by Dworkin for a hefty (411-page) volume called Language to Cover a Page, published in MIT Press’s Writing Art Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). I place poetry in quotes here because, strictly speaking, Acconci’s word texts —constraint-based lists, dictionary games, performance scores, or parodic translations-- are not so much poems as they are, in the Wittgensteinian sense, complex language games, in which the page has not yet been replaced by the video screen, the tape length, or the gallery space. Indeed, as Dworkin argues in an earlier piece on Acconci for October (95 [Winter 2001], pp. -
Laynie Browne Laynie Please Bernadette
Laynie Browne a ConCeptuaL assemBLage an introduCtion To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. - Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V Scene I, Prospero Looking for a title for this collection I turned first to the work of Bernadette Mayer, and found in her collection, The Desires of Mothers to 0: Introduction Please Others in Letters, the title “I’ll Drown My Book.” The process of opening Mayer to find Shakespeare reframed seems particularly fitting in the sense that conceptual writing often involves a recasting of the familiar and the found. In Mayer’s hands, the phrase “I’ll Drown My Book” becomes an unthinkable yet necessary act. This combination of BROWNE BROWNE unthinkable, or illogical, and necessary, or obligatory, also speaks to ways that the writers in this collection seek to unhinge and re-examine previous assumptions about writing. Thinking and performance are not separate from process and presentation of works. If a book breathes it 14 can also drown, and in the act of drowning is a willful attempt to create a book which can awake the unexpected—not for the sake of surprise, but because the undertaking was necessary for the writer in order to uproot, dismantle, reforge, remap or find new vantages and entrances to well trodden or well guarded territory. My contemporaries for the most part have often been distinguished by their lack of camps, categories, or movements. -
Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment, Conceptual Writing and the Subject
Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment, Conceptual Writing and the Subject-of-No- Subjectivity: "Pink Faeries and Gaudy Baubles" Dr Isabel Waidner (University of Roehampton, UK) Keywords Xenotext Experiment; conceptual writing; feminist science and technology studies; subject-of- no-subjectivity; avant-garde poetics Abstract Despite the wide impact of transdisciplinary scholarship that has theorised the interconnectedness of literature and science not least within the pages of this journal1, this article argues that the Canadian poet Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment2 (and conceptual writing in general) reproduces historical epistemologies (including positivism and relativism) 1 Melissa Littlefield and Rajani Sudan, "Editorial Statement", Configurations, 20:3 (2012): pp. 209–212. 2 Christian Bök, "The Xenotext Experiment", SCRIPT-Ed 5:2 (2008): pp. 227-231. 1 that rely on the presumption of disciplinary autonomy. In the sciences, these epistemologies are connected to sociocultural and economic power, extreme resistance to criticality, and the production of normative subject and object positions (including what I term the subject-of-no- subjectivity on the one hand; and the passive, inert object of scientific positivism on the other). The article explores the implications, problems, and affordances of reproducing historical epistemologies in conceptual writing. The key argument is that the reproduction of historical epistemologies in the disciplinary context of literature yields avant-garde credentials, marginalising often content-led experimental -
Reconceiving the Actual in Digital Art and Poetry
humanities Article Code and Substrate: Reconceiving the Actual in Digital Art and Poetry Burt Kimmelman Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA; [email protected] Received: 12 December 2016; Accepted: 5 July 2017; Published: 14 July 2017 Abstract: The quality of digital poetry or art—not merely as contained within our aesthetic reaction to digitally expressive works but as well our intellectual grounding in them—suggests that the digital’s seemingly ephemeral character is an indication of its lack of an apparently material existence. While, aesthetically, the digital’s ephemerality lies in the very fact of the digitally artistic enterprise, the fact is that its material substrate is what makes the aesthetic pleasure we take in it possible. When we realize for ourselves the role played by this substrate, furthermore, a paradox looms up before us. The fact is that we both enjoy, and in some sense separately understand the artwork comprehensively and fully; we also allow ourselves to enter into an ongoing conversation about the nature of the physical world. This conversation is not insignificant for the world of art especially, inasmuch as art depends upon the actual materials of the world—even digital art—and, too, upon our physical engagement with the art. Digital poetry and art, whose dynamic demands the dissolution of the line that would otherwise distinguish one from the other, have brought the notion of embodiment to the fore of our considerations of them, and here is the charm, along with the paradoxical strength, of digital art and poetry: it is our physical participation in them that makes them fully come into being. -
Towards a Literary and Feminist Neo-Avant-Garde: Carla Vasio’S Experimental Fiction
Towards a Literary and Feminist Neo-Avant-Garde: Carla Vasio’s Experimental Fiction Lucia Re and Joseph Tumolo Fig. 1. Carla Vasio, in her home in Rome in June, 2019. Photo: Joseph Tumolo. Reproduced with permission of Carla Vasio. Carla Vasio (b. 1923; fig. 1) was one of two women writers present at the Gruppo 63’s first meeting in Palermo in October of 1963. The other was her friend, the poet Amelia Rosselli. Despite Vasio’s active involvement in several of the group’s meetings and activities over the years, she is rarely mentioned in critical discussions, and very little attention has been devoted to her work.1 This is not an isolated oversight, but a part of a larger pattern of marginalizing the women writers of the Italian neo-avant-garde.2 Even a cursory reading of Vasio’s works shows that this marginalization is unjustified, and that she is a writer who actively contributed to the aesthetic innovation of the Gruppo 63 while creating her own experimental literary style. As will become clear, Vasio’s experimentation is a fine example of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, distinguished by its sophisticated feminist critique of both the dominant masculinist dynamic of the Gruppo 63 and the misogyny of postwar Italian culture and society. Far from being a mere phase in her literary production, Vasio’s commitment to literary experimentation and feminism endured in different forms well beyond the 1960s.3 1 See Lucia Re, “Fanalini di coda,” in Gruppo 63. Il Romanzo sperimentale. Col senno di poi, ed. Nanni Balestrini and Andrea Cortellessa (Rome: L’orma, 2013), 319. -
The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE Edited by joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK CONTENTS List of figures ix Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgements xvi 1. Introduction 1 JOE BRAY, ALISON GIBBONS AND BRIAN McHALE PARTI The historical avant-gardes 19 A. Modernist-era experimentalism 2. Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-Futurism 21 JOHN WHITE 3. The poetics of animism 36 Realism and the fantastic in expressionist literature and film RICHARD MURPHY 4. The surrealist experiments with language 48 PETER STOCKWELL 5. The literary absurd 62 JOANNA GAVINS B. Postmodernist experimentalism 6. Spontaneity and improvisation in postwar experimental poetry 75 BENJAMIN LEE 7. The nouveau roman and Tel Quel 89 DANIELLE MARX-SCOURAS 8. Lettrism and situationism 101 TYRUS MILLER CONTENTS 9. OuLiPo and proceduralism 115 JAN BAETENS 10. Metafiction 128 R. M. BERRY 11. Postmodernism and experiment 141 BRIAN McHALE C. Experiments with identity 12. Sexing the text 154 Women's avant-garde writing in the twentieth century ELLEN G. FRIEDMAN 13. Experiments in black 168 African-American avant-garde poetics ALDON LYNN NIELSEN 14. The limits of hybridity 182 Language and innovation in Anglophone postcolonial poetry PRIYAMVADA GOPAL D. The new experimentalism 15. Avant-Pop 199 LANCE OLSEN 16. Post-postmodernism 212 ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN 17. Globalization and transnationalism 224 LIAM CONNELL 18. Altermodernist fiction 238 ALISON GIBBONS 19. Manifestos and Ars Poetica 253 LAURA WINKIEL 20. Post-criticism 267 Conceptual takes GREGORY L. ULMER VI CONTENTS PART II Experiment now: printed matter 279 E. Experiments ivith language 21. -
Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Which Was First Printed in 2009 in an Edition of 1,000
This PDF is provided for free by UDP. It documents the existence of the book, Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, which was first printed in 2009 in an edition of 1,000. If you like what you see in this PDF proof, we encourage you to purchase the book directly from UDP, or from our distributors and partner bookstores, or from any independent bookseller. If you find this PDF useful for your research or as a resource for teaching, please consider making a donation. If you make copies of this PDF for your students or any other rea- son, we ask you to include this page. Please support nonprofit & independent publishing by making do- nations to the presses that serve you and by purchasing books through ethical channels. UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org Notes on Conceptualisms © Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman 2009, 2010 NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS ISBN-13: 978-1-933254-46-3 Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress VANESSA PLACE / ROBERT FITTERMAN Distributed to the trade by Small Press Distribution / SPD 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 www.spdbooks.org Available directly from UDP and through our partner bookstores: www.uglyducklingpresse.org/orders.html www.uglyducklingpresse.org/bookstores.html First Edition 2009 Second Printing 2010 Printed in the USA Ugly Duckling Presse The Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street #E-002 Brooklyn NY 11215 www.uglyducklingpresse.org NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS Foreword 9 Notes on Conceptualisms 13 Ventouses 59 Appendix 73 9 Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman [2009] PDF proof FOREWORD In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. -
Re-Thinking “Non-Retinal Literature”: Citation, “Radical Mimesis,” and Phenomenologies of Reading in Conceptual Writing1
Re-thinking “non-retinal literature”: citation, “radical mimesis,” and phenomenologies of reading in Conceptual writing1 “Unreadability”—that which requires new readers, and teaches new readings. Bruce Andrews, Text & Context I. Declaring the unreadable It’s no secret that Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith styles himself a provocateur. (The introduction from his recent critical book Uncreative Writing, featured in the “Review” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2011, for instance, states that in his classroom students “are rewarded for plagiarism” and that “the role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.”2) In the maze of self-quoting brief essays, introductions, and interviews on Conceptual poetry published prior to this book, which, too, includes self-citation, Goldsmith continually re-mounts the argument that the versions of “uncreativity” based on strategies of textual appropriation are warranted because the old versions of being creative are beyond worn out: “When our notions of what is considered creative became this hackneyed, this scripted, this sentimental, this debased, this romanticized…this uncreative, it’s time to run in the opposite direction. Do we really need another ‘creative’ poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? No.”3 Of course, Goldsmith may be ventriloquizing the point of fellow Conceptualist Craig Dworkin, who had introduced his UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing by stating: “Poetry expresses the emotional truth of 1 “Non-retinal literature” is a term coined by Bill Freind in “In the Conceptual Vacuum: on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Kent Johnson’s Day” (¶2); he adapts the term from Marcel Duchamp’s well known phrase “non-retinal art.” 2 Goldsmith, “It’s Not Plagiarism.