Reading Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Etel Adnan

Bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Etel Adnan, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Experiment, Inscription and the Archive: Kathy Acker’s Manuscript Practice

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Original Artwork ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Genetic Criticism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Duke University ◽  
A Site

This chapter explores the significance of the archive to a reading of avant-garde writing, taking the work of Kathy Acker as a case study. Utilising a framework of genetic criticism, the chapter explores the relation between the avant-texte and an avant-garde politics of materiality. Examining Acker’s original artwork for Blood and Guts in High School (1978) housed in the Kathy Acker Papers at Duke University, the chapter contends that the avant-textes reveal a feminist politics of materiality at work in Acker’s compositions. Through the lens of Johanna Drucker’s work on diagrammatic writing and performative materiality, the chapter argues for the avant-texte as a site of socio-political material resistance. The diagrammatic in Acker’s work demands new reading practices commensurate with this resistance.

Kathy Acker

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
Compositional Method

Kathy Acker’s body of work is one of the most significant collections of experimental writing in English. In Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, Georgina Colby explores the compositional processes and intricate experimental practices Acker employed in her work, from early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Through original archival research, Colby traces the stages in Acker’s compositional processes and draws on her knowledge of Acker’s unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, essays, illustrations, and correspondence to produce new ways of reading Acker’s works. Rather than treating Acker as a postmodern writer this book argues that Acker continued a radical modernist engagement with the crisis of language, and carried out a series of experiments in composition and writing that are comparable in scope and rigor to her modernist predecessors Stein and Joyce. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new non-conventional modes of meaning. Combining close attention to the form of Acker’s experimental writings with a consideration of the literary cultures from which she emerged, Colby positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental women’s writing.

Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
The Way

This book is about reading experimental writing. Specifically, it explores the way in which experimental writing changes reading practices in the contemporary period. The question of how to read is the issue that is in dispute in many works of contemporary experimental writing. In bringing together expert scholars whose works employ theoretical approaches from literary and linguistic, sociological, political, psychoanalytic and economic fields, the book recognises the heterogeneous forms of reading that experimental writing precipitates. Experimental writing today is bound to a politics of reading. The contributors gathered here examine the experimental works’ resistance to interpretation, the issue of ‘reading’ in contemporary culture, and timely questions surrounding the capacity of the works under scrutiny to generate new forms of meaning and voicing. My aim in editing this volume is to harness and present a prevalent view among critics of contemporary avant-garde literature: that it is precisely through the changed nature of reading that experimental writing can intervene in current socio-political discourses....

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

The Epiphany of Language: The Connotation of Zen-Taoism in Charles Bernstein's Echopoetics

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Yi Feng
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Taoist Philosophy

Abstract As a prominent representative figure of American Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has incorporated many themes concerning “nothingness” into his poetry. Contrary to the traditional Western philosophy that defines the concept of “nothingness” as meaninglessness and agnosticism, “nothingness” in Bernstein's poetics is endowed with profound poetic and aesthetic implications. Bernstein studied the works of Zen-Taoist philosophy in his early years. Understanding the Zen-Taoist connotations of “nothingness” is an important new dimension in interpreting Bernstein's echopoetics. Bernstein integrates the anti-traditional ideas in Zen-Taoist philosophy and aesthetics with the experiment of American avant-garde poetry. “The transformation between Xu (emptiness) and Shi (Being),” the beauty of “speechlessness,” and the expression of “defamiliarization” show the “epiphany” of language and the “nature” of language. The Chinese traditional Zen-Taoist philosophy is an important part of Bernstein's echopoetics.

Experience the Experimental

Contracultura ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Other Hand

Chapter 2 explores the connections between the artistic avantgarde and the counterculture. A small, but influential group of artists sometimes identified as “marginal” or “underground” coalesced in the aftermath of Tropicália. Cultura marginal may be located at the intersection of two cultural phenomenon: On one hand it had deep affinities with the emergent counterculture. On the other hand, cultura marginal was indebted to the mid-century constructivist avant-garde, especially neo-concretism. The author discusses the work of experimental artist, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who developed a series of environmental and performative works that demanded the active participation of spectators to create meaning. The author explores Oiticica’s dialogue with experimental writer and songwriter, Waly Salomão, whose work circulated within the rarified field of experimental writing, while also finding a mass audience through popular music, notably in the performances of Gal Costa. The author devotes a section to the journalist and artist Torquato Neto, who promoted cultura marginal and also performed in “Nosferato no Brasil,” a celebrated example of Super 8 film. Finally, the author analyzes the publication Navilouca, a graphic and textual project that brought together key figures of cultura marginal and the avantgarde.

John Cage (1921–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future ◽  
Musical Sounds

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.

Jolas, Eugene (1894–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Original Language ◽  
Berlin Alexanderplatz ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Literary Journal

Eugene Jolas was a journalist, editor, translator, and poet who embodied the transatlantic character of modernism between the World Wars. The task of transition, the Paris-based literary journal he edited with his wife Maria Jolas and others between 1927 and 1938, was to translate European culture for Americans, and vice versa. transition’s list of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of the international avant-garde. Jolas’ wealth of contacts in the literary world arose from his previous job writing the column ‘Rambles Through Literary Paris’ for the Chicago Tribune Paris edition. The romantic, imagination-driven strain of modernism that Jolas promoted led to a close relationship with Expressionism and Surrealism. Publishing non-anglophone experimental writing in translation or (after 1933) in the original language was a major focus of transition. Jolas also provided English translations of key European modernist texts outside the magazine, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1931).

Readymades

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Bicycle Wheel

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

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