Rejections of Barthes

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-192
Author(s):  
Calum Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Language Poetry ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
John Yau

The methodology of the book means that writers’ engagement with Barthes is what is studied, but this risks erasing writers who shy away from him. This chapter considers why some poets, particularly those who are people of colour and/or queer, reject Barthes aesthetically and politically. This issue is positioned in relationship to contemporary discussions of avant-garde poetry and whiteness, and these concerns are illustrated with a more in-depth reading of the work of John Yau. This is followed by a discussion of queer objections to the Barthes of language poetry and a consideration of his work in the context of the New Narrative. The chapter concludes by considering why Kathy Acker rejects Barthes in favour of Bataille.

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.

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.

Philosophy for Spiders

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
McKenzie Wark
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Body Building ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
Phenomenology Of The Body ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

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.

Poems, Poetry, Personhood

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Fundamental Object ◽  
Anglo American

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.

Introduction: Kathy Acker and the Avant-Garde

Kathy Acker ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Standard Form ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy

‘TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING’1 Kathy Acker writes in bold capitals in an unpublished notebook. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book. It brings together two interrelated axes of Acker’s practice: her continuation of radical modernism’s preoccupation with the crisis of language, and the avant-garde concern for producing art orientated towards the transformation of society. For early twentieth-century modernist writers the imbrication of form with content was a hallmark of their literary practice. The commitment to experimentation in form and language, upheld by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and James Joyce, is integral to the challenge modernist writers sought to pose to nineteenth-century realism. It was a key characteristic of their larger concern with the medium of writing. The precise nature of that concern with the medium of writing is crucial. Theorists of the avant-garde have attempted to draw a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde on the issue of aesthetic autonomy. Peter Bürger’s now classic work ...

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