Kenneth Goldsmith: Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011)

“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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Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith (eds.): Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011)

“In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways.

In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought.” Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.

Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.”

Publisher Northwestern University Press, 2011
Avant-garde & Moderism Collection series
ISBN 0810127113, 9780810127111
593 pages

Reviews: Brian M. Reed (American Book Review), Stephen Burt (London Review of Books), Peli Grietzer (LA Review of Books), Richard Kostelanetz (Mayday), Andrew McCallum (English in Education), Samuel Vriezen’> (deReactor, NL).
Commentary: Sam Rowe (Full Stop).
Interview with Craig Dworkin (Katie L Price, Jacket2).

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