Florian Cramer: Exe.cut(up)able statements: Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts (2011) [German]

“From the antiquity to today, there has been poetry that literally performs computations, processing its own letters. Prototyped by magic and Pythagorean mathematical aesthetics, it encompasses such diverse forms as kabbalist and Lullist language combinatorics, word permutation poetry, ludistic poetry, computational text collage, aleatoric, stochastic and recursive texts, Oulipian constraints, computer-generative literature, poetry in programming languages, and codeworks. Just like visual and sound poetry poetize the graphetic and phonetic dimensions of words, these writings show that computation is a dimension of language. On top of that, their poetics is rife with speculative and contradictory programs: often one and the same text form is at once being instrumentalized for total art and anti-art, mysticism and technicism, order and chaos. This has resulted in a fantastic literature whose speculative imagination manifests itself in the arrangement of letters rather than the semantics of the text. The book includes close readings of a 17th century sonnet (Quirinus Kuhlmann’s “XLI. Libes-kuss”), a 20th century musical composition (Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”) and a 21st century net.art codework (mez breeze’s “_Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1_”), and discusses limitations of existing literary and media theory for criticism of these works.

A shorter, less scholarly English-language mutant of this book has been electronically published in 2005 as Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination.”

Publisher Wilhelm Fink Verlag, October 2011
343 pages

Note: the book has just become free for Open Access publishing and is offered here for download in its manuscript version, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0.

Publisher

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Hal Foster (ed.): The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983)

“A collection of late-twentieth-century cultural criticism, named a Best Book of the Year by the Village Voice. In The Anti-Aesthetic, critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman’s film stills, to Barbara Kruger’s collages. The book provides an introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism.”

With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Edward W. Said, and Gregory L. Ulmer.

Edited and with an Introduction by Hal Foster
Publisher Bay Press, Port Townsend, WA, 1983
ISBN 0941920011, 9780941920018
xvi+159 pages

Reviews: Dana Polan (New German Critique, 1984), Laura Kipnis (Minnesota Review, 1984).

PDF (15 MB, updated on 2015-5-5)

Umberto Eco: The Open Work (1962–) [IT, PT, EN]

“Umberto Eco’s The Open Work remains significant for its concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.

This new English edition includes an introduction by David Robey that explores Eco’s thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco’s mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art.”

First published in Italian as Opera aperta, 1962.

English edition
Translated by Anna Cancogni
With an Introduction by David Robey
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1989
ISBN 0674639766, 9780674639768
285 pages

Publisher

Opera aperta (Italian, 4th ed., 1962/1997, added on 2015-1-8)
Obra aberta (Portuguese, trans. Giovanni Cutolo, 8th ed., 1971/1991)
The Open Work (English, trans. Anna Cancogni, 1989)