Jacques Rancière: Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998–) [ES, EN]

“Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.”

First published in French as La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Hachette Litteratures, 1998

English edition
Translated by James Swenson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory series
ISBN 0231151039, 9780231151030
194 pages

publisher (EN)

La palabra muda: ensayo sobre las contradicciones de la literatura (Spanish, trans. Cecilia González, 2009, 112 MB, added on 2014-3-6)
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (English, trans. James Swenson, 2011)

Espen J. Aarseth: Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997)

Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse—novels, films, television series—is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg textuality?

In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, Aarseth situates these literary forms within the tradition of “ergodic” literature—a term borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I Ching or Apollinaire’s calligrams, with which the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence.

Constructing a theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms build on this tradition, Aarseth bridges the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts. He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics to reexamine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and to explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for which they were not intended.

Publisher John Hopkins University Press, 1997
ISBN 0801855799, 9780801855795
203 pages

review (Darren Tofts, Mediamatic)

wikipedia
publisher
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Dick Higgins: Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987)

“Pattern poetry–poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art–has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt. Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures.

This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.”

Publisher SUNY Press, 1987
ISBN 0887064140, 9780887064142
x+275 pages

Review: Piotr Wilczek (Pamiętnik Literacki, 1989, PL).

Publisher

EPUB (updated on 2023-9-25)