Reading And Writing Experimental Texts

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

Explores the challenges and significance of experimental writing Offers a forum for reflecting on the significance of avant-garde writing for the twenty-first century Explores the way in which contemporary experimental writers engage with socio-political issues Utilizes unpublished archive materials bringing to light a number of previously unpublished worksIncludes innovative readings of significant avant-garde writers previously neglected in the critical canonBringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

The Social and Cognitive Studies in Writing and Literacy Series, is devoted to books that bridge research, theory, and practice, exploring social and cognitive processes in writing and expanding our knowledge of literacy as an active constructive process--as students move from high school to college. This descriptive study of reading-to-write examines a critical point in every college student's academic performance: when he or she is faced with the task of reading a source, integrating personal ideas, and creating an individual text with a self-defined purpose. Offering an unusually comprehensive view of this process, the authors chart a group of freshmen as they study and write in their dormitories, recording their "think-aloud" strategies for reading, writing, and revising, their interpretation of the task, and their broader social, cultural, and contextual understanding of college writing. Flower, Stein, and colleagues convincingly conclude that the legacy of schooling in general makes the transition to college difficult and, more important, that the assumptions students hold and the strategies they use in undertaking this task play a significant role in their academic performance. Embracing a broad range of perspectives from rhetoric, composition, literacy research, literary and cultural theory, and cognitive psychology, this rigorous analysis treats reading-to-write as both a cognitive and social process. It will interest researchers and theoreticians in rhetoric and writing, teachers working with students in transition from high school to college, and educators involved in the links between cognition and the social process.

From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing. Sullivan unpacks the work of major scholars in composition and rhetoric and their theories on aesthetics, particularly avant-gardism. She also relates the dialectics that shape these aesthetics and sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. Additionally, she shows how current debates over the value of multimedia texts echo earlier arguments that pitted experimental writing against traditional models. Sullivan further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn't changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences develops, expands and challenges conventional social scientific methodology and language by way of literary, poetic and other alternative sources of inspiration, as sociologists, social workers, anthropologists, criminologists and psychologists all rethink, provoke and reignite social scientific methodology. Challenging the mainstream orthodoxy of social scientific methodology, which closely guards the boundaries between the social sciences and the arts and humanities, this volume reveals that authors and artists are often engaged in projects parallel to those of the social sciences and vice versa, thus demonstrating that artistic and cultural production does not necessarily constitute a specialist field, but is in fact integral to social reality. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and across the arts and humanities working on the philosophy of social science, methodology, social theory, creativity, poetics, pedagogy and other related topics.

Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries. Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book. Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.

An exploration of what experimental literature in both print and programmable media tells us about the act of reading. In Scripting Reading Motions, Manuel Portela explores the expressive use of book forms and programmable media in experimental works of both print and electronic literature and finds a self-conscious play with the dynamics of reading and writing. Portela examines a series of print and digital works by Johanna Drucker, Mark Z. Danielewski, Rui Torres, Jim Andrews, and others, for the insights they yield about the semiotic and interpretive actions through which readers produce meaning when interacting with codes. Analyzing these works as embodiments and simulations of the motions of reading, Portela pays particular attention to the ways in which awareness of eye movements and haptic interactions in both print and electronic media feeds back onto the material and semantic layers of the works. These feedbacks, he argues, sustain self-reflexive loops that link the body of the reader to the embodied work. Readers' haptic actions and eye movements coinstantiate the object that they are reading. Portela discusses typographic and graphic marks as choreographic notations for reading movements; examines digital recreations of experimental print literary artifacts; considers reading motions in kinetic and generated texts; analyzes the relationship of bibliographic, linguistic, and narrative coding in Danielewski's novel-poem, Only Revolutions; and describes emergent meanings in interactive textual instruments. The expressive use of print and programmable media, Portela shows, offers a powerful model of the semiotic, interpretive, and affective operations embodied in reading processes. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Gerrit Haas re-theorises the peculiar textual conduct of ficto/critical writing, which inextricably intersects fictional with critical discourses as well as aesthetics with poetics and ethics. The slash here signals the conjunction between a self-reflexive ficto-critical insight and a wider discursive ficto-critical motivation. In its refined form, this twofold trope shifts perspective from the prevalent generic between onto the meta-generic level of our textual practices. Ultimately, the ficto/critical is thus qualified as an unheard-of interventionist aesthetic of deconstruction directed at the ramifications of our textual cultures.