Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through 'grammaleptic' reading, which is explored in the chapter in relation to reading experimental digital language art. Analyzing contemporary works by Samantha Gorman, Danny Canizzaro, and Dave Jhave Johnston, the chapter yields and understanding of the importance of 'grammaleptic' reading to encountering such works, and to inhabiting a landscape of emerging digital language art.

Rereading Race and Commodity Form in Erica Hunt’s Piece Logic

Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal antiracist ideals of racial progress understood primarily in terms of desegregated national inclusion within what Roland Marchand has called a “democracy of goods.” In this chapbook, Hunt explores how relations between subjects within and beyond the boundaries of the United States have been reshaped by an increasingly comprehensive system of differential economic valuation that redefines the meaning of racial difference, citizenship, family, and the material limits of formal equality. Hunt’s collection draws attention to how postwar processes of racial group formation are shaped by what Karl Marx calls “the fetishism of the commodity”, in which the life cycle of disposable objects mirrors the fate of racialized disposable or “surplus” populations. The devaluation and destruction of commodities, the chapter maintains, reflect a postwar racial order in which blackness comes to signify a limit case of relative expendability and the “broken” underside of postwar dreams of limitless consumer abundance.

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

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.

‘Fog is My Land’: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan

In a 1989 essay titled “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Etel Adnan describes the trajectory of her relationship to Arabic, a language associated with shame and sin in the context of her French convent education in Beirut, but which her Syrian father had her copy by rote from an Arabic-Turkish grammar as a desperate means of recuperation. Her family’s common languages were Turkish and French; Adnan acquired knowledge of Arabic writing through a channel more somatic than semantic. During the Algerian war of independence, when a dream of Arab unity emerged, Adnan’s attitude to the languages of her inheritance changed: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” How does this dream constitute itself in Adnan’s poetry and painting? And how are readers to parse the sometimes unintelligible sign systems that result? This chapter will explore the geopolitical implications of Adnan’s “xenoglossic” poetics, which sporadically merges the mediums of writing and painting in folded leporello books, to contemplate how her practices of transcription and supralinguistic gesture enable us to revise reigning discursive categories of cultural nativity and solidarity, citizenship and statelessness.

On Joan Retallack’s Memnoir: Investigating ‘the Experience of Experiencing’

This chapter reads Joan Retallack's Memnoir (2004) as an antidote to the limitations associated with generic memoir. Formal features such as the sparse us of the 'I' and Retallack's use of the page as a unit yields kaufman's comparison between Retallack's work and Dewey's observation that 'experience is omnipresent and ever important.' The poetic form offers a new form of memoir for Retallack, one that calls into question the project of recollecting one's past. Reconceiving the memoir as 'mindful' rather than 'memory', kaufman's close analysis blended with critical experiment reveals new forms of attention to the experimental work. This chapter scrutinises the way in which Retallack's work 'complicates the first person persona and offers an intervention into new forms of memoir that demand a panoply of forms of attention from the reader.

Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing

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....

Charles Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin, Among Other Things

This hybrid creative-critical chapter considers the work of American poet and scholar Charles Bernstein. The chapter is modelled formally on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and its use of found text to construct a critical montage. Benjamin’s influence on Bernstein can be dated to the late 1970s; the chapter begins with Bernstein’s early interest in Benjamin, and then tracks that interest throughout his poetry and poetics. The chapter also includes a discussion of Bernstein’s 2004 opera libretto Shadowtime, written for the music of English composer Brian Ferneyhough. This opera is based on Benjamin’s life and work.

A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall’s Hyphenated Practice: Towards an Interdependent Model of Reading

This chapter argues that Caroline Bergvall’s multi-media, multilingual, transhistorical work explores a hyphenated practice based on an interdependent relation between reader and text. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin, who argues that in the mother-child bond we find an alternative theory of the production of meaning, Rudy argues that the mother-child relation also offers an affective theory of the reception of experiemental work, since such work offers spaces where readers can also become ‘different, new’. Rudy approaches the queer texts in this ‘expanded field’ as a queer literary critic, drawing on the work of Lisa Ruddick and other practices of intersubjecvitity, she explores the notion that, through such practices, Bergvall’s writing has become a ‘public project’ into which we are invited to enter.

Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics

This chapter attends to the nuances and difficulties in reading and translating contemporary translingual poetry, by focusing on the German poet Uljana Wolf, who has traversed the language barriers between English, German, Polish, and Belarusian in conceptually and linguistically innovative ways in her multilingual and politically engaged poetry and poetics. The chapter argues that Wolf’s work criticises national and linguistic borders and ‘mother tongues’ both thematically and poetically, i.e. by way of neologisms, unusual syntax and prefixes, and by splicing a number of languages into the texture and prosody of what Wolf calls her ‘other-tongued’ German poetry. Such an approach to multi- and translingualism as a formal feature with political stakes and a concomitant rejection of an idealised originality, the chapter goes on to argue, also invites a similarly rigorous playfulness and multilingual alertness from a translator. Suggesting that translation is generative and dialogic, in its ability to forge conversations and transnational communities, Wolf’s experimental translational practice is contextualised by reference to other innovative English-language and translingual poets, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, M. NourbeSe Philip, and to the recent critical writing and anthologies of translation and anti-colonial discourses. In conclusion, the chapter argues that Wolf, along with these thinkers and poets, helps readers reconceive translation as a radically inventive and collaborative practice that complicates access to the ‘foreign’ it is usually supposed to facilitate.

Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian and Others

This chapter discusses various theories of happiness and gives particular consideration to Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that we need to rethink how the affect relates to the haphazard. Ahmed’s suggestion fits with Lyn Hejinian’s poetic experiments that present happiness as affirming happenings of the happenstance. After considering examples of that in Hejinian’s Happily (2000), the chapter then considers how John Cage used ‘chance determinations’ to make the happenstance happen in a range of his poetic ‘lectures’, including ‘Juillard Lecture’ (1952), ‘Indeterminacy’ (1958), ‘Diary: How to Improve the World’ (1965-82), and ‘Themes and Variations’ (1982). In analysing examples from those texts, the chapter reflects on how Cage’s lectures present and encourage modes of experimental reading that include being happily open to surprising aesthetic and affective possibilities. It concludes by comparing such happy reading to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of ‘reparative reading’.