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  1. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World

    Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.

    (Source: Publisher)

    Corey T. Sparks - 07.06.2017 - 20:59

  2. The Cybernetic Turn: Literary into Cultural Criticism

    Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

    About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

    tye042 - 18.10.2017 - 14:25

  3. The Cybernetic Turn: Literary into Cultural Criticism

    Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

    About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

    tye042 - 03.11.2017 - 17:30