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 xiii
... Critics are rarely faithful to their labels and their special strategies . I say that , as is affirmed in the first chapter , it is meet for this exposition to xiii be both literal and figural . Hermes , lord of Introduction, I.
... Critics are rarely faithful to their labels and their special strategies . I say that , as is affirmed in the first chapter , it is meet for this exposition to xiii be both literal and figural . Hermes , lord of Introduction, I.
Page xxii
... literal and concrete enactments of theoretical concepts— like Jacques Derrida's écriture sous rature , or Martin Heidegger's kreuzweise Durchstreichung — that have by now become all but clichéd . Similarly , they allow us to see ...
... literal and concrete enactments of theoretical concepts— like Jacques Derrida's écriture sous rature , or Martin Heidegger's kreuzweise Durchstreichung — that have by now become all but clichéd . Similarly , they allow us to see ...
Page 118
... literal , example of Paul Bourget's definition of a “ deca- dent " style , and one which Cage and Mac Low carry beyond its historical precedent : A decadent style is one where the unity of the book is broken down in favour of the ...
... literal , example of Paul Bourget's definition of a “ deca- dent " style , and one which Cage and Mac Low carry beyond its historical precedent : A decadent style is one where the unity of the book is broken down in favour of 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 Ezra Pound fact figure film Fin de Copenhague Finnegans Wake fragments History Howe's Humument Ibid illegibility instance Jackson Mac Low James Joyce John Cage Jorn Jorn's Joyce language layout legible letters lines linguistic literal literary 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 suggests Susan textual thematic theory tion trans translated transparent treated text Typography University Press Veil vision visual prosody Wittgenstein writing-through York