Reading the Illegible (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies) [Paperback]

Craig Dworkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2003 | Series: Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

An original, critical approach to reading texts rendered variously illegible-through erasures, excisions, overprintings, and rearrangements-by major twentieth-century artists and writers.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces-and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work.
Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cage's and Jackson MacLow's practices of "writing-through" other texts; the intentional "cancellations" of text by book artist Ken Campbell and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers; Susan Howe's experiments in typography and cultural transmission; visual complexity in Charles Bernstein, Stan Brakhage, and Rosemarie Waldrop; the "sedimentary" texts of post-minimalist artist Robert Smithson and poets Steve McCaffery and Christopher Dewdney ; the tactics of erasure employed by the poet Ronald Johnson and book artist Tom Phillips. In his scrutiny of these works, and with reference to a rich variety of contextual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual artworks, political and cultural theories, and experimental films-Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of such unreadable texts. His method seeks to unveil what Dworkin describes as "the politics of the poem"-what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that moves beyond aesthetic considerations into the realm of politics and ideology. Thus this book asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as on the mechanics of reproduction.

About the Author

Craig Dworkin teaches in the English department at Princeton University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; 1 edition (July 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810119277
• ISBN-13: 978-0810119277
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #386,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Text! Incredible Writing! Brilliant!, January 19, 2006

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This review is from: Reading the Illegible (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies) (Paperback)

In this exquisitely legible foray into the poetics of illegibility, Dworkin
takes on such forms of confusion.text, and effacement.text, and complex.text
as overwritten poetry, overprinted poetry, lined-out passages in poem, and
entirely censored poem by Man Ray, and then moving into land art by Smithson
and others in order to finally explore the poetics of illegibility more
broadly. Dworkin is unflaggingly obsessed with the avant-garde, and in talking about such only marginally
comprehensible texts, Dworkin summons his full tool box of
critical.linguistic.textual.analytic tools to do the job. Each lengthly
passage of analysis signifies new ways to read easily dismissable texts. He
has no one reductive argument, no simple insistence that "this stuff represents
our postmodern, muddled lives" or anything so cheap as that. Instead,
Dworkin moves through the various texts he looks at finding them variably meaningful, as
clearly their mechanics are quite different. In the middle of the book lives
what I suspect is one of Dworkin's favorite forms, the diastic poetry of
Cage and Jackson Mac Low. In those poems, the poets "write through" the
cantos of Pound (and others) to produce mechanistic, rule-governed
renderings of the larger text. I say that I think Dworkin likes this
strategy more than others because it works with the available, the flood of
existing text (Humumanent works this way too, of course, as Hayles has
discussed) while doing so within rule-governed methods for creation. He
likes it too, because of the Wakean jingles that result, the random playful
bits of language that result.

This is a book, then, about how to read graffiti on passing trains, about
how to read half-effaced ancient signage, about reading overwritten graffiti
and notes and all of the text that hangs on the bulletin boards of our
lives. It is a text, too, about not overlooking the illegible, the opaque,
the odd and apparently unsignifying. By employing poetics, what does not
clearly produce semantic meaning suddenly does, as the activity of social
and political artists (see the later discussion of Smithson, for instance)
is the activity of such opaque and hard to parse texts. This is poetry as
social, political, engaged, and pushing the envelop of meaning. In a
constellation of relation, there is Drucker, Pound, Joyce, Cage, Smithson,
all the other overwriting and illegible.fetishizing poets, and then there is
Dworkin pulling it all together, keeping it all separate, and ultimately
currating a fiasco of textual innovation.

This
is a map of the innovative, the poetic, the academic, and the original. So,
this is the map.