Experimental Writing

El presente artículo realiza un análisis comparativo entre el poema de Gertrude Stein " Patriarchal Poetry " y el largometraje de Robert Siodmak The Spiral Staircase. La escritora y el director toman como punto de partida la estructura patriarcal desde un acercamiento Modernista. Realizan una profunda crítica yendo a la raíz de dicha estructura a través de dos elementos cognitivos: la imagen y el sonido. La imagen de la mujer se explota de manera lingüística y visual dando lugar a un interesante juego con el receptor. Por otra parte, el sonido aporta la identidad tanto al objeto de la obra como al propio texto. Estos elementos textuales confieren una perspectiva de la mujer de su época enmarcada dentro de un determinado sistema connotativo. Examinaremos dichos conceptos para comprobar si alcanzan los objetivos de los autores y de qué manera los elementos cognitivos se fusionan en el texto.

This article develops what I call 'prac crip' as an innovative methodology to perform on the page the scholarly realities of working, living and writing with the disability of repetitive strain injury. Prac crip is a prac crit of crips that complicates liberatory crip criticism. It shows how repetitive strain injury changes an approach to practical criticism, but also, by association with 'crit' , how practices of practical criticism with repetitive strain injury shift some key uses of the 'crip'. Critical of this mode of cripping as well as cripical, prac crip demonstrates the emancipatory limits of practising crip criticism for those crips the work also hurts in the act. Peter Larkin's fascination with gleaning runs parallel to the rise of lean. To glean and its derivatives have a 'distinctive presence' in his lexis from Pastoral Advert (1988) to Seven Leaf Sermons (2018), a thirty-year period during which lean management has become increasingly global. The article traces through Larkin the eco-politically crucial relationships between the common right of gathering after harvest known as gleaning, historically, a practice for disabled people; the gesture of leaning; and the genealogy of global lean management technologies in the packing of lean meat. The essay explores how disability is an integral part of how its readings are produced, as well as addressing the predicament that work-related upper limb disorders, which are driven by lean managed environments, continue to be driven by writing against lean managed environments.

Oulipo has had tremendous influence on writing in the nearly 60 years since it began, but the idea of inventing condtraints for yourself, and then talking only about the constraints and not the literature that they produce (except as trhe outcomes of constraints) produces the strange situation of a literature whose literary qualities are not mentioned. This is an attempt to understand that,

Beim 40. Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis 2016 hat der israelische Autor Tomer Gardi mit einem Ausschnitt aus seinem Roman broken german für Verwirrung und Diskussionen, u.a. über die Frage, ob die Bedingung für die Teilnahme an einem Literaturwettbewerb nicht die Beherrschung der Sprache sein müsste, gesorgt. Der im titelgebenden „broken German“, also gebrochenem, fehlerhaftem Deutsch verfasste Text ist in der Tat ein „anspielungsreiches, anspruchsvolles und vergnügliches Plädoyer für die Sprachenvielfalt in der einen Sprache“, wie es im Werbetext des Verlags heißt.  In vorerst scheinbar losen, später jedoch raffiniert verknüpften Episoden wird von ImmigrantInnen in Berlin erzählt, von Treffen mit Freunden in Lokalen und in Call-Shops, von einer absichtlichen Kofferverwechslung, durch die Identitätsverlust und -findung auf überraschende Weise thematisiert werden, von der deutschen Besatzung in Rumänien, von der Aufarbeitung deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte und vielem mehr.
Dabei ist das Buch auf mehreren Ebenen mehrsprachig, so zum Beispiel (1) in der Figur des (streckenweisen Ich-)Erzählers, dessen Erstsprache offensichtlich nicht Deutsch ist, (2) im broken German als Kunstsprache, als artifizieller/ästhetisierter/literarisierter Varietät des Deutschen, (3) in der expliziten Mehrsprachigkeit – im Text sind neben dem Deutschen auch andere Sprachen und deren Sprecher präsent, (4) im Metadiskurs über Sprache (sowie über Literatur und Erzählen) etc.
Der vorgeschlagene Beitrag analysiert, wie auf Grundlage dieser Mehrsprachigkeit die Affektivität von Sprache (und die besondere Affektivität, die in mehrsprachigen Kontexten entstehen kann) bei Gardi auf der inhaltlichen Ebene narrativ dargestellt, auf der formalen Ebene performiert und damit auf der poetologischen Ebene reflektiert wird. Nicht zuletzt ist zu fragen, wie der Text gleichzeitig die Emotionen der (deutschsprachigen) LeserInnen anspricht (und zum Teil affektive Prozesse in der Rezeption vorwegnimmt), wie schon die Jury-Diskussion beim Bachmann-Preis gezeigt hat.

It could be said in different ways. Désoeuvrement for Blanchot. Melville’s Bartleby formula: “I would prefer not to”. The procadence that Fellini’s cinema professes,  or the exhaustion of the speech that phagocytes itself and occupies, without counting or telling, in Beckett. Ways of appearing of the refusal, the unfinished, the fugitive movement that recedes before the forms. Going back to Heraclitus, and moving on by Whitehead’s side, declaring that you never think twice about the same thing, because thought is pure process, continuum without beginning and end, modulation of forms to de-formation, rhythms to proliferation. Neither recognizing or surrendering to the prevailing hylemorphism. It could be said in a singular and profoundly anomalous way: Deep Blue. A place? No, rather an affective tonality, an anonymous occasion for a possible adventure of thought. A speculative fabulation, Donna Haraway would have said. A pre-individual community of thinkables that finds a singularizing attractor in cinema. A radical nomadism, where cinema, as a connective technique, makes up unprecedented relationships and connections across transversalities that make the cosmos germinate in multiverses that the point of view of creation explores, experiments and exhausts. A devotion to the moving of life that is affirmed in the course of devorations, diffractions, and obliquities. Without a priori, without presuppositions, without location or measure, being a remaining rest, ruin and excess of life to come. Aqueous immediation as journey and medium.

This column for Tears in the Fence magazine reflects on the notion and definition of the contemporary Avant-Garde. Bouncing off ideas and articles by Marjorie Perloff, David Lehman and Alain Badiou, this short article discusses the role and possibility of naming and classifying material as part of defining or categorizing avant-gardism. The presence or absence of pop culture, normative speech, disjunctive speech or punctuation, and other formal techniques at the heart of aesthetic debates on poetic practice are also discussed, in particular as presented in works published by presses such as Wave books or Ugly Duckling Presse. The column ends responding to Perloff's claim that the new avant garde is lyric conceptualism, claiming instead that the new has not yet arrived, though perhaps "Authors interested in the potential for the unknown are almost waiting for an art to emerge that has the potential to surprise, scandalize, and radicalize their view." This article does not attempt to answer as much as to meander around and mull over some of the core debates about definition and position of avant gardism today.

In vista di un saggio più articolato, questo intervento, in dialogo con altri scritti precedenti, ricostruisce assai sommariamente un frammento della situazione editoriale italiana in poesia, e le disponibilità di testi effettivamente distribuiti in libreria tra la fine degli anni Settanta e la seconda metà dei Novanta. Cerca così di mettere in chiaro come le tre maggiori case editrici italiane abbiano messo in pratica una ben precisa strategia di scelte, centrando quasi interamente la loro attenzione su un preciso tipo di scritture assertive, non sperimentali.
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Pubblicato su slowforward il 21 feb 2022:
https://slowforward.net/2022/02/21/poesia-per-il-pubblico-a-k/
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(CC) 2022 Marco Giovenale

In Azul Profundo Sebastian Wiedemann plunges into the transorganic space of Blue, a cinematic state of complete communion with the depths of Nature’s cosmological memory. Blue as guideline into a cinema of receptive profusion and total connection with one's intrinsic sensorial capacities. Deep Blue as cinematic wild experience and experiment of thinking, as a radical adventure into the potential of an unexpected speculative scenario where the verb to blue gain uncountable affective tonalities. How to conjugate the blue, how to blueing the world in infinite directions and senses is the lure of this performative film as a vitalist and minor gesture.

This is the original English version of the essay published in L'Homme 218, 2016, translated to French by Ariane Dorval (see below item for French). A longer version serves as the introduction to "Redescribing Relations," see above.


This version has been updated from the version some have already downloaded because it came to my attention that there were more footnotes in the French version. So I have added footnotes 5 and 14, which bumps up (as in the French version) the long footnote on the ontological turn, from number 15 to 17. It remains 15 in the longer version that appears as the introduction to the volume I edited, Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. This footnote (but more so one of Strathern's dreams) has also inspired a short intervention and debate in the journal Social Anthropology (see 'Interpreting Strathern's 'Unconscious' Critique of Ontology').

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Contributors: Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Kevin Nolan, Donald F. Theall, Bob Perelman, Simon Critchley, D.J. Huppatz, Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Keston Sutherland, Nicole Tomlinson, Julian Savage, Bruce Andrews, Augusto de Campos, Darren Tofts, Gregory L. Ulmer, J. Hillis Miller, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Louis Armand, Steve McCaffery, Allen Fisher.

Note: draft has different title (final book is called Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music)

The eight extended essays in Sounding Art are experiments in writing unconventionally about sound, sound art and electronic music in the context of other arts and disciplines. The essays are each structured in a way that reflects the subject, and use visual, fictional and other literary devices and references. In short, this book isn’t only about electronic music, but offers ways to consider sound and music, and listening. There’s an accompanying CD of excerpts from composers and artists such as Autechre, Merzbow, Ficarra, Dhomont, Harvey, Westerkamp and Ceccarelli, to name but a few."""

Con el Manifesto técnico della letteratura futurista y el Supplemento y Distruzione della sintassi. Imaginazione senza fili. Parole in libertà, el futurismo concibe nuevos usos tipográficos como reflejo de la tumultuosa vida moderna. En un primer momento, esa nueva construcción tipográfica se dirigió al pasado para convertir la letra en una verbalización de la palabra y su fonética. Con ¿Zang Tumb Tuuum¿ (1914) se superaba la página tradicional por una visualidad en la que la tipográfica se muestra en toda su radicalidad expresiva. De ahí a las experiencias de literatos y artistas plásticos (Boccioni, Cangiullo, Buzzi y Carrá) que se publican en ¿Lacerba¿ y ¿L¿Italia futurista¿ hasta los tipos pintados en los que destacaron Carrà, Severini, Balla y el primer Depero. Ese lenguaje que hibrida palabra e imagen es asumido también por los literatos como Luciano Folgore, Arnaldo Ginna, Bruno Corra y, especialmente, Paolo Buzzi. A partir de 1915 Buzzi asume en sus libros el lenguaje cinematográfico, en el que definitivamente otorga a la palabra la sonoridad de la música. Corrado Govoni, por otra parte, construye sus poemas replanteando caligráficamente lo escrito. El artículo hace hincapié en las tres figuras determinantes para comprender la revolución tipográfica futurista. El primero, Francesco Cangiullo elaboró espectáculos de variedades tipográficos a partir del folklore napolitano en relevantes libros-objeto. Fortunato Depero exportó los experimentos tipográficos al campo publicitario siendo el puente con las experiencias de los años treinta en el norte de Italia. Pino Masnata destacará por un trabajo derivado de las prácticas caligramáticas.

This dissertation was an enquiry into the role of the 'artist' characters in the novels of Don DeLillo and, through these figures, an enquiry into the notion of 'installing' one practice within another. The literary critique/analysis of DeLillo's fiction is counterbalanced by a reading of Thomas Crow's art-historical writing, especially his account of the work of Christopher Williams. A theory is developed to account for the kind of intertextuality at work in both these areas; an intertextuality that is less a tissue of reference and quotation and more a 'hosting' of other practices. This theory is tentatively proposed as 'porous modernism'. The dissertation then applies these thoughts in a sustained fashion to DeLillo's novel 'Libra', a historical work that makes a deep engagement with the US government's 'Warren Report'; a text that DeLillo considers Joycean in its scope and its polyphony. Finally, the dissertation has a visual, practical component - a set of typewritten replicas of DeLillo's pages of drafts from the writing of 'Libra', produced during a research period at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin).

Fractured Ecologies is a collection of papers, bent essays, and playful poetic impressions that positions marginal aesthetic forms front and center. The idea of Fractured Ecologies is that rigorous and irreverent papers addressing experimental writing and other borderline manifestations in an environmental context are infinitely interesting and always fresh.

ISBN: 978-87-92633-52-1
http://www.eyecornerpress.com/fractured-ecologies/

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics
have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the
Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.

This is a manifesto claiming for the need of experimental writing as a powerful tool to help overcome three of the biggest problems of psychology: its obsession with repre- sentation, its complicity with colonialism and its neglect of the body. These three problems, I argue, can be fought by breaking apart the writing technologies we use to produce knowledge in psychology and moving toward experimental writing. Experimental writing thus is important for theoret- ical, political and ontological reasons that I will elaborate. While I explain these three problems, and as a performa- tive exercise of my argument, a tryptic poem will be inter- woven and simultaneously written. The name of the poem is Beheaded Monsters. While this Abstract has reflected on content, I conclude with a ’Concrete’ that reflects on form.

Forgotten notes and essay passages about David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. It seems somehow appropriate to the book as we have it that I just present them as they stand, and hope that they elucidate some points of interest.

Este artículo examina dos obras narrativas tardías de Samuel Beckett, "Mal Vu Mal Dit" y "Worstward Ho", situándolas en el desarrollo de la estética metaficcional y autorreflexiva del autor. Los rasgos minimalistas de estas obras se ven como una modalidad de autorreferencialidad narrativa y estética.

_______________________________________________________

This paper examines two of Samuel Beckett's late narrative works, "Ill Seen Ill Said" and "Worstward Ho", setting them in the context of the author's developing metafictional and self-reflexive aesthetics. The minimalist features of the works are analyzed as a mode of narrative and aesthetic self-referentiality.

Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs.

This book explores the international relevance of the concept of neo-avant-garde for the study of post-war literary innovations covering North American, Latin American, Caribbean, Austrian, French, British, Belgian, Dutch and German cases. Each of the twenty-one newly commissioned chapters combines theoretical reflection with practical analysis. Together, they provide a multi-faceted account of diverse group and trends, such as the New Realists, Black Arts Movement, Labris and the Vienna Group. They also focus on a wide range of authors, like Pierre Alferi, Amiri Baraka, Konrad Bayer, Mario Bellatín, Kamau Brathwaite, and Anna Kavan. In addition, they pay attention to specific techniques, including erasure, lyricisation, and montage, and to specific genres such as comic books, experimental fiction, and visual poetry.

Henry David Thoreau's transcendental lecture/essay, after pruning, becomes conceptual poetry with an accompanying score for reading, walking, speaking, singing, playing. A reading path leads through Thoreau's words, keeping a trace of the original text as the visible root of Emmanuelle Waeckerlé's rewilding; this mise en abyme reveals endless potential paths. Readwalking describes a simultaneous act of reading and walking: reading as walking, of walking as reading, of reading a text about walking, step by step, putting one foot in front of the other, each word calling the next, following one's instinct or senses, as one is going along a reading path, as Thoreau writes, always going west, sauntering, readwalking as if one's life depended on it… "I speak the (non-walking) words one at a time as I encounter them, one leading me to the next as it completes it. The last may sometimes leave a trail."

'Emmanuelle Waeckerlé's score lifts the materiality of the text out of its ordinary fusion with the flows of meaning and rumination. Read-walking Thoreau, even in one's own mind, has the salutary effect of an acupuncture of the spacetime of reading. Constellations of ideas virtually glow around Thoreau's grey-scaled text, beautifully illuminated from different angles by Vicky Smith and Michael Hampton's essays.' Cécile Malaspina.

‘…lately it’s been a really great time to study/the political art song format’, mused Laurie Anderson in her ‘Empty Places’ performances of 1989-1990, anticipating by almost a decade the early work of affect theory centred on political figures (Ronald Reagan, Pauline Hanson, George W Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, Angela Merkel). Political songs are no longer (if they ever were) complete compositions: they come to us in snatches and bursts, catchy hooks and binding rhythms. A refrain or ritornello attunes to an affective state, resonates with it and amplifies it, renders it contagious and re-performs it until it becomes habit. As writers and performers (and anthropologists like Catherine Clément) have long understood, not only political or literary but all language works in the mode of the spell: it aims to transform rather than to represent a state of affairs; to seduce rather than to persuade. It is about action, not truth. Moreover the animating powers of language are not absolute nor even determining, but relative to the media that transport it, including especially the increasing powers of the digital world, which exceed those of the human. Starting from within the milieu and at the advent of the assemblage, this paper examines the affective powers of language as it interfaces with human the nonhuman agencies of viral media, the algorithm and the image.

An introduction to Verbivoracious Press' new paperback edition of Christine Brooke-Rose's 1960 novel "The Dear Deceit". Includes some of my research previously published as a chapter in the Verbivoracious Brooke-Rose Festschrift and some new research from the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, TX. The paperback is available direct from the press' website by following the link below;

http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/the-dear-deceit/

Se trata de un estudio de la novela "El Innombrable" de Samuel Beckett, en particular de sus aspectos reflexivos y metaficcionales, y de la especialidad modalidad de estructuración narrativa y de clausura articulada en esta novela. Es una aproximación situada entre la estética, la semiótica y la fenomenología. Estudiamos aquí el sentido en que puede decirse que el silencio es un elemento constituyente de la escritura de Beckett. Este fenómeno se presenta evidentemente como una paradoja, y se articula a través del uso artístico del metalenguaje.

If in the use of the term 'fictocriticism' the usually dispensed-with hyphen attempts to join the 'ficto' with the 'critical' it also inevitably severs them and holds them apart. Here the typographic device creates a complex conceptual space and a space of potentiality, that is to say, a space for both thought and action. In this tense and quivering gap arises the possibility of a writing otherwise: a writing in which the confident authority of argument gives way to hesitation and doubt, and the house of fiction begins to fall apart, perhaps into a chasm. Here the plot is uncertain; place is displaced; setting becomes unstable; site gives way to constantly shifting situation. We are in the middle of something, immersed in the materiality of writing as doing and making, a thinking taking shape in action, and then shifting that shape again at the very moment it forms. It is in this process that we could say that 'writing takes place'.

At Macedonio Fernández's funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: “In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature.” This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world's leading scholars on Macedonio Fernández, one of Borges's most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges's own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges's thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio's life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio's writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio's original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernández's texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

This article discusses an artistic research project that investigates the impact of Body Weather performance training on the perceptual process and modes of knowing of the performer. It revisits an early stage of my doctoral research, in which my main concern was to develop an
embodied approach to the articulation of the knowledge created by the training practice. It begins with a brief introduction of the Body Weather training programme and the practice that is the focus of my investigation: the Manipulations. Drawing on the concept of bodily
knowledge, it indicates the difficulty in providing a linguistic articulation of the tacit knowledge that is embodied in artistic practice. The article discusses how I address this issue by developing a ‘research score’ and creating a ‘Glossary’, and how these two are combined in order to think through the Manipulations. It provides a close reading of the process of alteration that is enabled by the Manipulations and a thick description of the research score, arguing that the latter allows for an equal relationship between practice and writing. It concludes by sharing observations regarding the expansion of training practice into a medium of research and the potential of my approach to research into training to become a mode of training research.

Pond is an experimental novel that takes place entirely inside the mind of an unnamed protagonist. It relates the thought processes and intensely focused observations of an elusive, dissociated woman. Her language is fresh, and yet often completely ordinary, repetitive and seemingly trivial too. (Imagine some staid and pedantic neighbour garrulously rambling on about broken knobs on her cooker, Sheaffer pens, or a tube of tomato paste.) The repetitions, however, are cl.everly patterned, in such a sustained way that the reader gradually realises that this is not just a domestic narrative but pure prose poetry

A collection that re-visions the Austrian avant-garde, translated and published for the first time in English.

After 1945, a vibrant literary avant-garde emerged in Austria that has remained mostly unknown outside of the country. Their first publications appeared in a cultural and political environment still largely determined by seven years of Nazism (1938-1945) and four years of Austrofascism (1934-1938). Its writers drew on traditional and experimental methods to hollow out existing literary conventions and propose new ones, using montage, appropriation, satire, irony, and nonsense. Despite many shared intentions, though, the Austrian avant-garde was far from unified. Some of its writers repeated the authoritarian gestures and practices of the fascist period; others contributed to the creation of feminist and queer counterpublics by creating alternative presses, new kinds of literary events, and political writers’ collectives.

An Austrian Avant-garde offers a critical survey of experimental writing from Austria that captures the tensions inherent in the history of the avant-garde. Starting with texts from the 1950s by the Vienna Group, the anthology offers a survey of the complex, contested landscape of post-1945 Austrian literature, with an emphasis on the work of women writers. The editors’ preface and their introductions to individual texts offer contextualization and commentary that make the anthology accessible to a wide readership.

With texts by:

Friedrich Achleitner
Ilse Aichinger
H.C. Artmann
Heimrad Bäcker
Konrad Bayer
Ann Cotten
Carola Dertnig
Elfriede Gerstl
Elfriede Jelinek
Ilse Kilic
Margret Kreidl
Florjan Lipuš
Friederike Mayröcker
Andreas Okopenko
Julian Palacz
Kathrin Röggla
Gerhard Rühm
Lisa Spalt
Herbert Wimmer

“An Austrian Avant-garde profoundly expands our understanding of what experimental writing is and what it can do. This fantastic collection recalls to mind the premise of the radical avant-garde—its utopian potential to bridge the distance between art and life. No one can read these writers and remain the same.”
—Fatima Naqvi, Yale University

Tracing a nominal genealogy, from Robert Fludd’s “Et sic in infinitum,” to The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, to Finnegans Wake, to Georges Perec’s La Disparition & beyond, it’s possible to speak of a “poetics” of constitutive erasure that comes to generalize itself, not as a literary device, but as a textual condition—whose theoretical elaboration is paradigmatic of the so-called poststructuralist turn: exemplified in the section of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie entitled “Writing Before the Letter” (1967) & the closely related essay “La différance” (1968). Like Malevich’s Black Square (1915), Fludd’s mimēsis of nothingness in Utriusque Cosmi (1617) & Lawrence Sterne’s “black page” (from one of the foundation texts of the modern novel; 1768-9), pose questions about the representation of the negative & the limits of signification wherever writing pushes into the domain of asemic interference. In the case of Joyce’s portmanteau (emergent lexicality or lexical fusions: “word, letter, paperspace”) & Perec’s lipogrammes (systematic lexical omissions), this question of representation is literalised in the operations of inscription itself—as the complementary counterpart of that work of “erasure” seemingly depicted by “blacking-out.”

This dissertation was an enquiry into the role of the 'artist' characters in the novels of Don DeLillo and, through these figures, an enquiry into the notion of 'installing' one practice within another. The literary critique/analysis of DeLillo's fiction is counterbalanced by a reading of Thomas Crow's art-historical writing, especially his account of the work of Christopher Williams. A theory is developed to account for the kind of intertextuality at work in both these areas; an intertextuality that is less a tissue of reference and quotation and more a 'hosting' of other practices. This theory is tentatively proposed as 'porous modernism'. The dissertation then applies these thoughts in a sustained fashion to DeLillo's novel 'Libra', a historical work that makes a deep engagement with the US government's 'Warren Report'; a text that DeLillo considers Joycean in its scope and its polyphony. Finally, the dissertation has a visual, practical component - a set of typewritten replicas of DeLillo's pages of drafts from the writing of 'Libra', produced during a research period at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin).

The précis (or, an ABSTRACT, of sorts), as presented to an audience
at the 2016 Somatechnics Conference, Bundjalung Country,
Byron Bay, Australia (READ TO SELF):

The Darkening is a polyvocal performance script calling forth the
embodied linguistics of relational becoming. Presented at
Somatechnics 2016 as a queered academic panel, the work is ‘written
aloud’, to use Roland Barthes’s term (1976), employing the devices of
chorus, choralography, perpetual canon, echolalic vocality, singing and
story telling. In speaking/writing eir own stories the panellists fall into
the orbits of one another’s languaging, a harmonics of intratextuality
producing bodies as ‘events of expression’ (Bray and Colebrook
1998: 36). In the words of Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, these
bodies, rather than being ‘organised by representation’, are to be
understood in terms of ‘becomings, connections, events, and activities’
(1998: 36), in this case via a proliferation of speaking positions, the
materialisation of ulterior affective tones and self-reproducing texts that
reveal voices inside voices—a Matryoshka of utterance, black as river
pearls.
The panicked text explores the affective power of linguistic
redundancies resulting from the evacuation of subjectivity in the state
of an uncued panicked attack. Wild lines of deterritorialising flight
disrupt order-words, perform an unspeaking and makematter of mutter,
stutter and utter. Meaning is made of syntactical chaos, and of the ictic
dance of hands, feet and head.
The failing text presents ‘language lined with flesh’, where a
pre-(recorded) and post-testosterone voice performs an iterative and
echolalic paper from the body in transformation. The changing voice is
posited as a site of queer optimism for the person who changes, and
queer failure for those who do not. Following on from Jacques Derrida’s
critique of phonocentrism (1974), where voice is understood to be in
direct proximity to being, an interrogation of the desire to locate
subjectivity within the temporality of sound is performed, and a space
where written and spoken language collide is opened.
The witch-mother text holds an infant, glittering, splits the night sky
with eir howls. A line of stars dances from eir laughing mouth like a
garland of roses. Each flickering expression of being, each vitality form,
activates neuronic mirrors amongst eir familiars. Long before flesh is
worded up, we process arousal states, sensory inputs, emotional content, and narrative substance into a generative Gestalt: the subjective
experience of being alive.
As these storied patterns cross and cross over, new configurations
and assemblages of words are produced, designed to be uncradled and
(h)executed from different openings at the source. The iterative,
infinitely self-reproducing texts are uncountable, always already written.