Georgina Colby (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474440387
- eISBN:
- 9781474481236
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440387.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Alex Houen
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199609291
- eISBN:
- 9780191731723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609291.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukács discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present ‘concrete potentialities’ of ...
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In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukács discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present ‘concrete potentialities’ of individual character in novel ways. In this book Alex Houen explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti‐Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the ‘revolutionary potential’ of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of ‘human potential’ in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, the chapters also show how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of ‘potential’: ‘possible as opposed to actual’; ‘a quantity of force’; a ‘capacity’ or ‘faculty’; and ‘potency’. Such an approach can be characterized as a literary ‘potentialism’ that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasizes, so much as a novel concept of literary practice—a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of ‘postmodernism’ and the ‘postmodern avant‐garde’.Less
In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukács discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present ‘concrete potentialities’ of individual character in novel ways. In this book Alex Houen explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti‐Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the ‘revolutionary potential’ of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of ‘human potential’ in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, the chapters also show how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of ‘potential’: ‘possible as opposed to actual’; ‘a quantity of force’; a ‘capacity’ or ‘faculty’; and ‘potency’. Such an approach can be characterized as a literary ‘potentialism’ that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasizes, so much as a novel concept of literary practice—a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of ‘postmodernism’ and the ‘postmodern avant‐garde’.
Craig J. Saper
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474455053
- eISBN:
- 9781474481267
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474455053.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a ...
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A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a whole, this chapter is a history of modernism and modernist writers, artists, journalists, poets, radicals and others.Less
A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a whole, this chapter is a history of modernism and modernist writers, artists, journalists, poets, radicals and others.
Alex Houen
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199609291
- eISBN:
- 9780191731723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609291.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
With references ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Agamben, the Introduction starts with consideration of how individuals’ capacities and faculties have been conceived in terms of potentiality. ...
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With references ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Agamben, the Introduction starts with consideration of how individuals’ capacities and faculties have been conceived in terms of potentiality. Drawing on Foucault and others, it discusses how such capacities have increasingly been regulated as labour power and purchasing power. This bears on assertions that postmodernism's predominance of late‐capitalism undermines culturally combative possibilities of individual freedom and literary experimentation. Such an assertion has, however, been contested by various American activists, theorists, and writers since the 1960s. The Introduction outlines how some of those contestations are taken up in the subsequent chapters. It also shows how ‘potentiality’ has frequently been invoked by theorists of postmodernism, postmodern avant‐gardism, and literary ‘possible worlds’, although the theorists have not considered at length how the complex meanings of potentiality bear on both individual capacity and literary possibility.Less
With references ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Agamben, the Introduction starts with consideration of how individuals’ capacities and faculties have been conceived in terms of potentiality. Drawing on Foucault and others, it discusses how such capacities have increasingly been regulated as labour power and purchasing power. This bears on assertions that postmodernism's predominance of late‐capitalism undermines culturally combative possibilities of individual freedom and literary experimentation. Such an assertion has, however, been contested by various American activists, theorists, and writers since the 1960s. The Introduction outlines how some of those contestations are taken up in the subsequent chapters. It also shows how ‘potentiality’ has frequently been invoked by theorists of postmodernism, postmodern avant‐gardism, and literary ‘possible worlds’, although the theorists have not considered at length how the complex meanings of potentiality bear on both individual capacity and literary possibility.
Paul Grimstad
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199874071
- eISBN:
- 9780199345465
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199874071.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Criticism/Theory
This final chapter presents some concluding thoughts. This book has examined the prose and poetry of four different writers who have linked experience and experiment. In their writing a move from ...
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This final chapter presents some concluding thoughts. This book has examined the prose and poetry of four different writers who have linked experience and experiment. In their writing a move from experience understood as a squaring of inner with outer matters to experience understood as a search for the conditions by which a work becomes shareable can be found. This process is called “experimental writing”. The rest of this final chapter outlines how that process is differently acknowledged in four provisional universals. The works analysed in this book are about discovering ways of going on within a common linguistic inheritance.Less
This final chapter presents some concluding thoughts. This book has examined the prose and poetry of four different writers who have linked experience and experiment. In their writing a move from experience understood as a squaring of inner with outer matters to experience understood as a search for the conditions by which a work becomes shareable can be found. This process is called “experimental writing”. The rest of this final chapter outlines how that process is differently acknowledged in four provisional universals. The works analysed in this book are about discovering ways of going on within a common linguistic inheritance.
Georgina Colby
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748683505
- eISBN:
- 9781474426930
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748683505.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jutta Schickore
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226449982
- eISBN:
- 9780226450049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226450049.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Fontana’s renewed engagement with the subject of viper venom resulted in a massive study of more than 600 pages. Book II of the Treatise on the Venom of the Viper produced a new interpretation of the ...
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Fontana’s renewed engagement with the subject of viper venom resulted in a massive study of more than 600 pages. Book II of the Treatise on the Venom of the Viper produced a new interpretation of the working of viper venom and turned to the exploration of the “hidden causes” of the observable effects of venom poisoning. The new book is again permeated by methods discourse. Fontana’s methodological statements became much more pointed and elaborate, and he drew them together in a methodological essay. Most early modern texts contained quite detailed and often vivid narratives of concrete experiments. Fontana’s commitment to variations turned the attention from single events to series of experiments and from the uniformity of outcomes to differences. This opened up new questions, both questions of experimental design and related questions of conceptualization, interpretation, and, ultimately, reporting: What are the factors need to be varied? What do the differences between different experiments tell us? How much of this work should be reported? And how should the report be organized? The chapter argues that Fontana’s sprawling account was meant to demonstrate the discoverability of empirical findings.Less
Fontana’s renewed engagement with the subject of viper venom resulted in a massive study of more than 600 pages. Book II of the Treatise on the Venom of the Viper produced a new interpretation of the working of viper venom and turned to the exploration of the “hidden causes” of the observable effects of venom poisoning. The new book is again permeated by methods discourse. Fontana’s methodological statements became much more pointed and elaborate, and he drew them together in a methodological essay. Most early modern texts contained quite detailed and often vivid narratives of concrete experiments. Fontana’s commitment to variations turned the attention from single events to series of experiments and from the uniformity of outcomes to differences. This opened up new questions, both questions of experimental design and related questions of conceptualization, interpretation, and, ultimately, reporting: What are the factors need to be varied? What do the differences between different experiments tell us? How much of this work should be reported? And how should the report be organized? The chapter argues that Fontana’s sprawling account was meant to demonstrate the discoverability of empirical findings.
Barbara Will
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231152631
- eISBN:
- 9780231526418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231152631.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter discusses the beginnings of the friendship between two intellectuals, Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, which served as the context for reconciling Stein's “progressive” ...
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This introductory chapter discusses the beginnings of the friendship between two intellectuals, Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, which served as the context for reconciling Stein's “progressive” experimental writing and her later “reactionary” politics. Both Stein and Faÿ would find that they had many things in common, yet perhaps the most profound—if not the most troubling—aspect of this friendship was their mutual admiration of Philippe Pétain, whose politics seemed counter to Stein's progressive, avant-garde aesthetics and beliefs. Further complicating the issue wasthe troubled backdrop of the interwar years—wherein the political upheavals following the First World War had given way to jadedness for the current political systems, as well as the formation of new hybrid political movements—with an uneasy Europe struggling to come to terms with the United States' siren's call for “modernization.”Less
This introductory chapter discusses the beginnings of the friendship between two intellectuals, Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, which served as the context for reconciling Stein's “progressive” experimental writing and her later “reactionary” politics. Both Stein and Faÿ would find that they had many things in common, yet perhaps the most profound—if not the most troubling—aspect of this friendship was their mutual admiration of Philippe Pétain, whose politics seemed counter to Stein's progressive, avant-garde aesthetics and beliefs. Further complicating the issue wasthe troubled backdrop of the interwar years—wherein the political upheavals following the First World War had given way to jadedness for the current political systems, as well as the formation of new hybrid political movements—with an uneasy Europe struggling to come to terms with the United States' siren's call for “modernization.”
Tymon Adamczewski
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780197267240
- eISBN:
- 9780191965074
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197267240.003.0008
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
In winter 2017, a Polish homelessness charity published a book of literary texts, written almost entirely by people with experience of homelessness, entitled Niewidzialni (The Invisibles). The ...
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In winter 2017, a Polish homelessness charity published a book of literary texts, written almost entirely by people with experience of homelessness, entitled Niewidzialni (The Invisibles). The intention behind The Invisibles was to construct the experience of homelessness through an intriguing material practice: the book is printed in ink that is only visible in sub-zero temperatures and can only be read outside of the warmth and comfort of our flats and sofas. It consequently forces the reader to share the experience of being out in the cold. This chapter looks at the strategies used in the book to (re)produce the experience of living rough and the way in which its representation becomes subject to elliptical practices. This will include a discussion of the different perspectives on the questions of agency and forms of representation, or representability, of ‘roofless’ existence and the need for expression.Less
In winter 2017, a Polish homelessness charity published a book of literary texts, written almost entirely by people with experience of homelessness, entitled Niewidzialni (The Invisibles). The intention behind The Invisibles was to construct the experience of homelessness through an intriguing material practice: the book is printed in ink that is only visible in sub-zero temperatures and can only be read outside of the warmth and comfort of our flats and sofas. It consequently forces the reader to share the experience of being out in the cold. This chapter looks at the strategies used in the book to (re)produce the experience of living rough and the way in which its representation becomes subject to elliptical practices. This will include a discussion of the different perspectives on the questions of agency and forms of representation, or representability, of ‘roofless’ existence and the need for expression.
Lynne Hapgood
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526123503
- eISBN:
- 9781526141972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526123503.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its ...
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This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its historical moment and an evolving linguistic and political discourse. It argues that, in a period of social change, Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. It explores the ways in which Harkness’s writing participates in and contributes to emerging forms of experimental writing that seek to relay the experience of urban modernity.Less
This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its historical moment and an evolving linguistic and political discourse. It argues that, in a period of social change, Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. It explores the ways in which Harkness’s writing participates in and contributes to emerging forms of experimental writing that seek to relay the experience of urban modernity.
Natalie Ferris
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- February 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780198852698
- eISBN:
- 9780191887055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198852698.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The final chapter moves away from earlier conceptions of abstraction in literature elucidated in the book, such as a literature that is non-representational, iconographic, or satirical of its own ...
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The final chapter moves away from earlier conceptions of abstraction in literature elucidated in the book, such as a literature that is non-representational, iconographic, or satirical of its own existence as art, to mark out the rising ambitions within the British post-war novel towards a new brand of visualization influenced by screen culture. Considering the varied approaches taken by the novelists John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, and B. S. Johnson towards the novel as a construct, as novel and as ‘anti-novel’, the discussion scrutinizes the visible layers of truth and artifice in post-war fiction in order to prompt new and more resonant ways of looking in, at, and through literary narrative.Less
The final chapter moves away from earlier conceptions of abstraction in literature elucidated in the book, such as a literature that is non-representational, iconographic, or satirical of its own existence as art, to mark out the rising ambitions within the British post-war novel towards a new brand of visualization influenced by screen culture. Considering the varied approaches taken by the novelists John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, and B. S. Johnson towards the novel as a construct, as novel and as ‘anti-novel’, the discussion scrutinizes the visible layers of truth and artifice in post-war fiction in order to prompt new and more resonant ways of looking in, at, and through literary narrative.
Justin Clemens and Rowan Wilken
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474401241
- eISBN:
- 9781474435031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401241.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps ...
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Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.Less
Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.
David Herman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190850401
- eISBN:
- 9780190850432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190850401.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up ...
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With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.Less
With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.
Natalie Ferris
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- February 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780198852698
- eISBN:
- 9780191887055
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198852698.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 ...
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This book traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors, and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalized context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives, and Art & Language, and bringing a wide range of previously unexplored archival material into the public domain, this book offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional, and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel. The post-war period, this book suggests, was witness to the intensification of the meeting between spatiality and visuality in literature.Less
This book traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors, and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalized context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives, and Art & Language, and bringing a wide range of previously unexplored archival material into the public domain, this book offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional, and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel. The post-war period, this book suggests, was witness to the intensification of the meeting between spatiality and visuality in literature.