Aleksandar Bošković: Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s (2013)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · art, art history, avant-garde, book, constructivism, montage, photomontage, poetry, technology, typography, visual poetry
The extraordinary junction between poetry, photography and photomontage — photopoetry — flourished in avant-garde books and journals throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The new genre aspired to appropriate the products of technological culture in creating poetry more alert to the mass sensibility of a rapidly changing mechanical age. As a new hybrid form that combines poetic text and photographic images, it was ripe for poetic experimentation and production of optical provocations.
This dissertation focuses on three avant-garde photo-poetry books — Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s About This (1923), Nezval and Teige’s Alphabet (1926), and Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s unpublished and little known To the Workers of Kursk (1924-7) — examining them from the angle of the bioscopic book, a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. (from the Abstract)
Dissertation
Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 2013
309 pages
PDF, PDF (9 MB, updated on 2020-7-23)
See also Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s book in PDF (3 MB, via vk.com). Commentary: Bošković (2017).
Comment (0)Michael Backes: Experimentelle Semiotik in Literaturavantgarden: über die Wiener Gruppe mit Bezug auf die Konkrete Poesie (2001) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, concrete poetry, history of literature, literary criticism, literature, poetry, semiotics, visual poetry
“Mit einem beispiellosen theoretischen und praktischen Aufwand versuchte die Wiener Gruppe, etablierte Werte und realitätskonstitutive Symbolordnungen in ihren Grundfesten zu erschüttern. Die Mittel reichten von seriellen Formzerstörungen über die Dezentrierung “diskursiver Ordnungen” (Derrida, Foucault) bis hin zur aktionistischen Fiktionalisierung von Situationsdefinitionen. In einiger Hinsicht kann man also von einem Poststrukturalismus avant la lettre sprechen. Mit ihm hebt sich die Wiener Gruppe nicht nur von tradierten Literaturmodellen, sondern auch von jener Ästhetik der Selbstidentität ab, die Autoren wie Gomringer oder S.J. Schmidt vertreten. Am Leitfaden von exemplarischen Mikroanalysen entwickelt Backes ein Begriffsinstrumentarium, mit dem sich die experimentelle Semiotik der Wiener Gruppe im Verhältnis zur Konkreten Poesie adäquat erschließen und historisch situieren läßt.”
Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2001
Das Problempotential der Nachkriegsavantgarden series, 1
ISBN 3770534506, 9783770534500
345 pages
Kenneth Goldsmith: Theory (2015) [EN, FR]
Filed under artist publishing | Tags: · language, literature, poetics, poetry, theory, writing
“Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts – from poems and musings to short stories – printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital, and calls for the reinvention of creative forms.”
Edition directed by Mathieu Cénac and David Desrimais
Publisher Jean Boîte, Paris, May 2015
ISBN 9782365680103 (EN)
500 pages
Theory (English, cover, inner side of wrapper, label)
Théorie (French, trans. Léa Faust, cover, label)