Results by title

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators

A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.

Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.

Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.

The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.
 

With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message.

Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.

A study of the signifying potential of paper, the foundational material for literary texts in the modern era.

For ease of reading, the paper of a printed page must recede far enough into the background to make ink legible. Yet paper—the primary substrate for literary texts—has its own signifying potential, its own poetics. Craig Dworkin shows that looking at the page, rather than through its illusory withdrawal, can unlock interpretive insights that readers would otherwise miss. What often seems incidental can prove to be as semantically important as the words of the text themselves.

Substrate argues that the material affordances of paper in general—its pliability, fibrous weave, and capacity to fold, tear, crumple, and shuffle—variously inform the poetics of William Blake, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jen Bervin, and Susan Howe. For all four of these poets, the qualities of paper serve as models for structuring the language of their poems in innovative ways. Dworkin further shows how each poet in turn engages paper at another level by incorporating it within the thematic ambit of key poems. The full meaning of these poems is thus inextricable from their printing. Substrate is a brilliant inquiry in poetics and the logic of media more generally.

A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon.
 
An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable of the dictionary definition of imprimer (to score, to print). Trawling the internet for cute videos of cats “playing” piano, an artist splices together a complete, note-perfect performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Half a century after the release of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue, a jazz quintet spends months of focused practice to reproduce the original exactly. These performances share a common denominator: absolute fidelity to the outcome of a system. From Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, Steve Reich to Sun Ra, The Sound of Thinking brings together a diverse array of musical or sonic works that are algorithmic, automatic, permutational, procedural, or otherwise structured in contrast to the creative expressivity typically associated with artistic production.
 
In twenty-six short essays, each keyed to a term that begins with a different letter of the alphabet, Dworkin discusses work composed or performed according to a predetermined rule, transforming artistic creation into a system running its course. The pieces detailed here, drawn from more than a century of musical experimentation, offer a fresh perspective on the history of innovative music by decoupling music from expression and by shunting creativity from the level of organizing sounds to the level of devising a system that can do the organizing. Not only does this book spotlight the critical role of music in twentieth-century conceptual art, but it also identifies previously overlooked links among diverse artists and movements.