Reading the IllegibleA poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces-and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work. Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cage's and Jackson MacLow's practices of "writing-through" other texts; the intentional "cancellations" of text by book artist Ken Campbell and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers; Susan Howe's experiments in typography and cultural transmission; visual complexity in Charles Bernstein, Stan Brakhage, and Rosemarie Waldrop; the "sedimentary" texts of post-minimalist artist Robert Smithson and poets Steve McCaffery and Christopher Dewdney ; the tactics of erasure employed by the poet Ronald Johnson and book artist Tom Phillips. In his scrutiny of these works, and with reference to a rich variety of contextual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual artworks, political and cultural theories, and experimental films-Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of such unreadable texts. His method seeks to unveil what Dworkin describes as "the politics of the poem"-what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that moves beyond aesthetic considerations into the realm of politics and ideology. Thus this book asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as on the mechanics of reproduction. |
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Page 89
... source texts . For Words nd Ends from Ez he read through The Cantos much as Cage did , replacing the exclu- sionary rule with the constraint that each index - letter had to occupy the same position in the excerpted source text as it ...
... source texts . For Words nd Ends from Ez he read through The Cantos much as Cage did , replacing the exclu- sionary rule with the constraint that each index - letter had to occupy the same position in the excerpted source text as it ...
Page 135
... text's disruption of its source should not , however , overshadow the fact that such commentary is never uni- lateral . Rather than elaborate the treated texts ' critique of their sources , I want to offer an example of the way in which the ...
... text's disruption of its source should not , however , overshadow the fact that such commentary is never uni- lateral . Rather than elaborate the treated texts ' critique of their sources , I want to offer an example of the way in which the ...
Page 136
... source text is worked around to create a fiction from within its fixed parameters , leaving “ a singular record , not only on account of its contents , but of the manner in which it seemed to have been composed . " 53 In fact , even the ...
... source text is worked around to create a fiction from within its fixed parameters , leaving “ a singular record , not only on account of its contents , but of the manner in which it seemed to have been composed . " 53 In fact , even the ...
Contents
List of Illustrations ix | xi |
Radical Formalism 3 | xxvi |
The Politics of Noise | 31 |
Copyright | |
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aesthetic argument artists Asger Jorn avant-garde Berkeley Blake's Brakhage Bruce Andrews Cage and Mac Cage's California Press Camp Printing Cantos censorship chapter Charles Bernstein Chicago collage Collected Writings critical Debord détournement diastic poem economy edited error essay fact figure film Fin de Copenhague Finnegans Wake fragments G. E. M. Anscombe History Howe's Humument Ibid illegibility instance Jackson Mac Low John Cage Jorn Jorn's Joyce language layout legible letters lines linguistic literal literary London Low's Mac Low Mallarmé Marjorie Perloff material McCaffery meaning Melville's Marginalia Mémoires mesostic Moreover noise nonsite optical overprinting painting paragrammatic Paris Pataphysics Phillips Phillips's phosphenes poetic poetry poets political Pound precisely radical reader reading reference Robert Smithson sense signifier Situationist Situationist International Smithson Société source text Steve McCaffery structures sublime Susan textual tion translated transparent treated text typographic University of California University Press Veil vision visual prosody Wittgenstein writing-through York