Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture) [Hardcover]

Joe Amato (Author)

Book Description

Series: S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture | Publication Date: August 1997

Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Bookend sets the stage for a new kind of writing." -- Marjorie Perloff

"Joe Amato's passionate, acrobatic, and audacious engagement with the limits of discursiveness aims to repixelate our reception of virtual culture. Like a test pattern coming from just beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy, Bookend's static is a call for us to readjust our sets." -- Charles Bernstein

"Situated somewhere between the world of print and cyberspace, Amato's Bookend is an amazing read -- fast, provocative, learned, hypertextual, fun." -- Gail E. Hawisher

"This is a difficult book aware of its joys; a joyful book aware of its difficulties." -- Michael Joyce --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Joe Amato is Assistant Professor of English in the Lewis Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and author of Symptoms of a Finer Age.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 079143401X
• ISBN-13: 978-0791434017
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,603,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe Amato completed his undergraduate degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering at Syracuse University, and his Master of Arts and doctoral degrees in English at University at Albany. A licensed professional engineer in New York State, he spent seven years in industry working in various project engineering capacities. Amato is the author of nine books: Samuel Taylor's Last Night (novel, Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming 2012); Big Man with a Shovel (novel, Steerage Press, 2011); Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (memoir, SUNY Press, 2009); Pain Plus Thyme (poetry, Factory School, 2008); Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (criticism, University of Iowa Press, 2006); Under Virga (poetry, Chax Press, 2006); Finger Exorcised (poetry, BlazeVOX [books], 2006); Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (criticism, SUNY Press, 1997); and Symptoms of a Finer Age (poetry, Viet Nam Generation, 1994). Amato's essays, poetry and digital art have been published in Antennae, 88, Chain, Crayon, Jacket, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Mad Hatters' Review, Mandorla, New American Writing, Postmodern Culture, MiPOesias, Notre Dame Review, Nineteenth Century Studies, The Iowa Review Web, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Electronic Book Review. His screenplay, Yellow Medicine (coauthored with Kass Fleisher), advanced to the semifinal round of the 2006 Nicholl Fellowship competition, hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while placing in the second round of the 2006 Austin Film Festival. Two other screenplays, Bear River and High Country (also with Fleisher), advanced to the semifinal round of the 2003 Chesterfield Writer's Film Project fellowship competition, hosted by Paramount Pictures. Amato and Fleisher have recently adapted Big Man with a Shovel for the screen, and completed a play, Fat Jack's. Amato currently teaches writing and literature at Illinois State University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In cyberspace where the self transmogrifies, Amato ventures, June 1, 2000

By 

Rob Wilson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)

Meet me in cyberspace where the self transmogrifies into ecstatic and traumatic forms of new and simuluated selfhood, and you will understand the "virtual reality" territory Joe Amato is venturing into and mapping with all the rage of a concerned citizen and the talented writing skills of an innovative poet.

This timely SUNY Press book is exploring and opening new territory for US poetics of the counter-canonical sort, and as such is a valued and compelling foray into this new sublimity of cyberspace writing. The "book may end" here, but the "virtual self" and its masks, tasks, and possibilities are only beginning, dear mongrel reader, lost and wandering in this same vasty & unexplored hyper-capitalist transnational space yourself...