Reading the illegible / Craig Dworkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dworkin, Craig Douglas.

Series:

Avant-garde and modernism studies

Avant-garde & modernism studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 238 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Summary:

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces--and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work. Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cege, Jackson MacLow, Ken Campbell, Marcel Broodthaers, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstain, Stan Brekhage, Rosmarie Waldrop, Robert Smithson, Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, Ronald Johnson and Tom Phillips. Dworkin's method seeks to unveil what he describes as "the politics of the poem"--what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, and implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader; and other questions relating to the poem as material object.

Contents:

1 Radical Formalism 3

2 The Politics of Noise 31

3 Destroying Redness 50

4 The Inhumanness of Language 71

5 Gamble and Sharp 88

6 Cover-Up 123

7 The Aesthetics of Censorship 138.

Notes:

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1998.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-229) and index.

ISBN:

0810119269

0810119277

OCLC:

50960859