Reproduction as Literary Production: Self-Expression and the Index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing

This chapter discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, a collection of essays that includes an account of his Uncreative Writing course at the University of Pennsylvania. Championing various forms of literary automatism and appropriation, which are often treated as a much-needed response to our contemporary digital environment, the book is offered as a counter-model to established notions of authentic, self-expressive writing. The article takes this position as a springboard into thinking about Goldsmith’s writing exercises in relation to a longer history of indexical artistic practices, most notably analog photography. Despite its own positioning vis-à-vis the digital, I claim, Goldsmith’s writing model can best be understood as an extension of a proto-photographic logic into the ambit of contemporary literature. At the same time, as I show, the use of textual reproduction central to his project has been a longstanding ingredient of self-expressive literary advice. I conclude by arguing that Goldsmith’s model is just as tied to a form of personal expression, albeit one following a less obviously self-expressive logic that resonates with online forms of indexical performativity.