Kenneth Goldsmith: Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · appropriation, authorship, conceptual writing, concrete poetry, data, language, literary theory, literature, poetry, technology, text, uncreative writing
“Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.”
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
ISBN 0231149913, 9780231149914
272 pages
Interviews with author: CUP blog (2011), Mark Allen (The Awl, 2013).
Reviews: Andrea Quaid (American Book Review, 2011), Sam Rowe (Full Stop, 2011), Stephen Burt (London Review of Books, 2012), Amelia Chesley (J Electronic Publishing, 2012), Michael Jauchen (HTMLGiant, c2012), Grant Matthew Jenkins (James Joyce Quarterly, 2012), Andrew McCallum (English in Education, 2013).
Commentary: Special section of American Book Review dedicated to uncreative writing (ed. Doug Nufer, 2011).
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Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos: Teoria da Poesia Concreta – Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950-1960, 2a ed. (1965/1975) [Portuguese]
Filed under book | Tags: · concrete poetry, literary theory, literature, poetry, visual poetry
O concretismo alterou profundamente a realidade da poesia brasileira. Revisou o passado literário do país e retomou o diálogo com o modernismo de 1922; pôs ideias em circulação e colocou à arte novos desafios. Hoje, está presente também na linguagem da propaganda, nos slogans da televisão, na diagramação de livros, nas letras de bossa nova. Este volume reúne os textos inaugurais do movimento concreto e recupera uma história que andava obscurecida pelos preconceitos de seus opositores.
First published in 1965
Publisher Livraria Duas Cidades, São Paulo, 1975
207 pages
via Horacio Gutiérrez
Pignatari’s bibliography at Monoskop wiki
Comment (0)Irradiador: revista de vanguardia, 1–3 (1923) [Spanish]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · art, avant-garde, concrete poetry, estridentismo, literature, mexico, poetry, politics
“The Irradiador journal was edited by the artist Fermín Revueltas (1902-1935) and was the major early voice for the Mexican avant-garde movement called Estridentismo. The journal was short-lived, and only saw three issues: September, October, and November of 1923. Still, it saw contributions by major players in the international avant-gardes, all the while staying carefully attuned to Estridentismo‘s present social concerns for post-revolutionary Mexico.
The journal’s foremost concern was the propagation of the new aesthetics in Mexico, and furthering the cultural project of the Mexican revolution. Irradiador, it promised in its motto, ‘Will make reactionaries lose sleep, and will affirm all the anxieties of the present hour.’
The journal featured woodcuts, sculptures, paintings, poems, and articles on subjects as diverse as archaeology and the petroleum industry. Its first issue contains a calligram by none other than the muralist Diego Rivera–an important endorsement for a nascent avant-garde movement like Estridentismo. It also contained a poem by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which bolsters the international credibility of the Mexican movement.
Other important poets, writers, and artists to be featured over the three issues: Salvador Gallardo, Germán List Arzubide, Kyn Tanya, Juan José Tablada, and the U.S. photographer Edward Weston, whom the magazine inexplicably calls ‘Dwad Weston’ (Irradiador 3, inside cover).
The magazine’s aesthetic is a combination of Mexican images–such as Charlot’s woodcuts of indigenous workers–and modern technology, promoting the ‘Jazz Band, petroleum, New York. The city all polarized crackling in the radiotelephonic antennas…’ (‘Inaugural Irradiation’, 1).” (sourced from Kelly Scott Franklin’s blog)
Scans via The Jean Charlot Collection & the University of Hawaii at Manoa
Commentary by Evorio Escalante (video, 3 min, in Spanish)
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