Constellations II New Methods and Texts

Amnasan, Michael. “The Eclipsing Function of Full Comprehension.” New Narrative writer Amnasan meditates on the relation between sublime incompletion, the gap between labor and public, and narrative: “Within monotonous labor the sublime feels suspended, promised to unfold as the work’s conclusion, as a broad space of material fascination.”

PUBLISHED: Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), 6:104–8.

KEYWORDS: New Narrative; class; public sphere; material text.

LINKS: Michael Amnasan, from Joe Liar (PJ 10); Steve Benson, “Mediations in an Emergency” (PJ 5); Bruce Boone, “A Narrative Like a Punk Picture: Shocking Pinks, Lavenders, Magentas, Sickly Greens” (PJ 5); Jerry Estrin, “Cold Heaven: The Uses of Monumentality” (Guide; PJ 9); Larry Price, “The Contingency Caper” (PJ 7); Leslie Scalapino, “Pattern—and the ‘Simulacral’” (PJ 7); Ron Silliman, “‘Postmodernism’: Sign for a Struggle, Struggle for the Sign” (PJ 7).

Child, Abigail. “The Exhibit and the Circulation.” Avant-garde filmmaker/poet Child reads the “constructivist biographies” of her Soviet forebears Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, charting the parallels between montage and writing. She finds Eisenstein’s status as “modern artist, making it big” to be theatrical, admires Vertov’s more fragmentary openness.

PUBLISHED: Postmodern? (1987), 7:71–78.

KEYWORDS: cinema; Russian poetics; formalism; modernism.

LINKS: Abigail Child, “Outside Topographies: Three Moments in Film” (PJ 8); with Sally Silvers, “Rewire//Speak in Disagreement” (PJ 4); Viktor Shklovsky, “Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov” (Guide; PJ 1); Warren Sonbert, “Narrative Concerns” (Guide; PJ 5).

Friedman, Ed. “How Space Stations Gets Written.” Friedman describes the development of Space Stations, a process-oriented experiment in textual production begun in 1979 that juxtaposes “present-time physical phenomena”; “memory, ideas, emotional responses”; “reading material” (NASA’s Apollo 13 Spacecraft Commentary); and visual images.

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:22–39.

KEYWORDS: nonnarrative; experience; visuality; method.

LINKS: Steve Benson and Carla Harryman, “Dialogue: Museo Antropología, Mexico” (PJ 8); cris cheek, “… they almost all practically …” (PJ 5); Tina Darragh, “In 1986, I began …” (PJ 9); Fred Frith, “Helter Skelter” (PJ 9); Nick Piombino, “Towards an Experiential Syntax” (PJ 5); Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing” (Guide; PJ 9); John Zorn, “Memory and Immorality in Musical Composition” (Guide; PJ 9).

Jarolim, Edie. “Ideas of Order.” In her review of Lydia Davis’s Story and Other Stories, Jarolim connects the individual stories’ exploration of order and its ironic underside with the self-consciousness of her narration: “The careful dialectical questions the narrator poses […] clearly serve the same distancing and controlling functions for her as the act of writing.”

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:143–45.

KEYWORDS: narrative; psychoanalysis; subjectivity; readings.

LINKS: Lydia Davis, “Coolidge’s Mine” (PJ 3), “Some Notes on Armantrout’s Precedence” (PJ 6); Pierre Alferi, “Seeking a Sentence” (Guide; PJ 10); Robert Glück, “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille” (Guide; PJ 2); Lanie Goodman, “Georges Perec: Life Directions for Use” (PJ 3); Ted Pearson, “Unit Structures” (PJ 5).

Lloyd, David. “Limits of a Language of Desire.” In his critique of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, the anthology published in 1984, Lloyd admires the collective project’s undermining of liberal ideologies of presence and representation, but asks whether the fragmentariness of the resulting aesthetic might not reinforce capitalism in a more efficient form.

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:159–67.

KEYWORDS: Language writing; critical theory; politics; readings.

LINKS: Bruce Andrews, “Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis” (Guide; PJ 6); Rae Armantrout, “Mainstream Marginality” (Guide; PJ 6); David Benedetti, “Fear of Poetic (Social) Knowledge: Why Some People Don’t Like (Language) Poetry” (PJ 10); Charles Bernstein, “Professing Stein/ Stein Professing” (PJ 9); David Bromige, “Alternatives of Exposition” (PJ 5); Alan Davies, “Strong Language” (PJ 7); Norman Finkelstein, “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry” (PJ 9); Félix Guattari, “Language, Consciousness, and Society” (PJ 9); George Hartley, “Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier” (Guide; PJ 7); Kofi Natambu, “The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art,’ and Politics in the United States Today” (PJ 9); David Plotke, “Language and Politics Today” (PJ 1); Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “Robert Creeley and ‘The Person’” (PJ 9).

McCaffery, Steve. “And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?” McCaffery sees the mass media’s dissemination of narrative as having produced a form of saturated but stultifying hypercommunication in which “media narrative is no longer a localizable telling but the refabrication of information as impulses far removed from any social dictates of communication.”

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:65–68.

KEYWORDS: nonnarrative; postmodernism; public sphere; media.

LINKS: Jeff Derksen, “North Of” (PJ 8); William McPheron, “Remaking Narrative” (PJ 7); Kathy Acker, “Ugly” (Guide; PJ 7); Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, from This Is Your Life (PJ 9); Allen Fisher, “Postmodernism as Package” (PJ 7); Andrew Ross, “The Oxygen of Publicity” (PJ 6); Rod Smith, from “CIA Sentences” (PJ 10); Lorenzo Thomas, “The Marks Are Waiting” (Guide; PJ 10).

Middleton, Peter. “The Knowledge of Narratives.” In a context of skepticism about narrative among poets, Middleton recalls the degree to which narrative, while banished from positivism, cannot be dissociated from scientific knowledge. Narratives of discovery, progress, time, and space may be taken for granted, but there is no objective truth outside them.

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:52–57.

KEYWORDS: narrative; science; knowledge; philosophy.

LINKS: Michael Davidson, “Framed by Story” (PJ 5); Mikhail Dziubenko, “‘New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology” (PJ 8); Lyn Hejinian, “La Faustienne” (PJ 10); Nick Piombino, “Towards an Experiential Syntax” (PJ 5).

Moriarty, Laura. “The Modern Lyric.” Moriarty charts the turn to lyric poetry in four language-centered poets, finding a common impulse to “possess the world through stylistic accuracy” at epiphanic moments as characteristic of the genre. “The lyric sensibility is a heroic one,” but it also offers “refuge from the world which threatens and overwhelms [one].”

PUBLISHED: Postmodern? (1987), 7:133–39.

KEYWORDS: lyric poetry; Language writing; negativity; readings.

LINKS: Laura Moriarty, “Sex and Language” (PJ 8); Jackson Mac Low, “Persia/Sixteen/Code Poems” (PJ 4); Rae Armantrout, “Chains” (PJ 5); Kathleen Fraser, “Overheard” (PJ 4); Ben Friedlander, “Lyrical Interference” (PJ 9); Herman Rapaport, “Poetic Rests: Ashbery, Coolidge, Scalapino” (PJ 10); Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day” (Guide; PJ 8); Aaron Shurin, “Orphée: The Kiss of Death” (PJ 10); Chris Tysh, from “Dead Letters” (PJ 10); Hannah Weiner, “Other Person” (PJ 9).

Piombino, Nick. “Towards an Experiential Syntax.” Piombino seeks the relationship between the dynamics of psychoanalytic processes (“primary forms of free association and the analyst’s suspended, evenly hovering attention”) with “their syntactical expression in speech and writing.” Poetry and art become necessary sites for reordering perception and cognition.

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1986), 5:40–51.

KEYWORDS: psychoanalysis; science; experience; visuality.

LINKS: Beverly Dahlen, “Forbidden Knowledge” (Guide; PJ 4); Steve Benson, “Personal as Social History: Three Fictions” (PJ 7); Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “The Eroticism of Forgetting” (PJ 10); Ed Friedman, “How Space Stations Gets Written” (PJ 5); Peter Middleton, “The Knowledge of Narratives” (PJ 5); Fiona Templeton, “My Work Telling the Story of Narrative in It” (PJ 5).

Price, Larry. “The Contingency Caper.” In a media-saturated, postmodern world, narratives are often reduced to a codified “suspended mimesis” of reduced meaning within their overdetermined atomization. Postmodern writing is an attempt to break down these reduced narratives in order to reanimate the drama, violence, and agency of their lost origins.

PUBLISHED: Postmodern? (1987), 7:3–17.

KEYWORDS: postmodernism; media; nonnarrative; meaning.

LINKS: Larry Price, “Aggressively Private: Contingency as Explanation” (PJ 6); “Harryman’s Balzac” (PJ 4); Michael Amnasan, “The Eclipsing Function of Full Comprehension” (Guide; PJ 6); Alan Bernheimer, “The Simulacrum of Narrative” (PJ 5); Daniel Davidson, “Bureaucrat, My Love” (PJ 10); Michael Gottlieb, five poems (PJ 10); Steve McCaffery, “And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?” (PJ 5); John Rapko, “What Will Postmodernity Be?” (PJ 7); Jim Rosenberg, “Openings: The Connection Direct” (PJ 10); Peter Seaton, “An Example from the Literature” (Guide; PJ 6).

“Symposium on Narrative.” Sixteen writers, performers, and visual artists were asked, “What is the status of narrative in your work?” Responses range from examples of nonnarrative form (Andrew Voigt’s scores; Fiona Templeton’s performance); to skepticism about overarching narratives (Warren Sonbert’s films; Doug Hall’s installations); to advocacy of the critical redeployment of narrative (Michael Davidson; Robert Glück; Carla Harryman).

PUBLISHED: Non/Narrative (1985), 5:69–121.

KEYWORDS: narrative; nonnarrative; performance; visual art.

LINKS: Steve Benson, “Mediations in an Emergency” (PJ 5); Carla Harryman, “Toy Boats” (Guide; PJ 5); Bob Perelman, “Exchangeable Frames” (PJ 5); “Poets Theater: Two Versions of Collateral” (Guide; PJ 5); Leslie Scalapino, “Poetic Diaries” (PJ 5); Warren Sonbert, “Narrative Concerns” (Guide; PJ 5).

“Symposium: Postmodern?” Is the theoretical discourse of “postmodernism” a necessary and useful framework for producing contemporary writing and art? The nine responses range from strong rejection of the postmodern (Bill Berkson; Allen Fisher; Duncan McNaughton; Alan Davies) to its critical embrace (John Rapko; Connie Fitzsimons; Kathy Acker).

PUBLISHED: Postmodern? (1987), 7:95–117.

KEYWORDS: postmodernism; modernism; critical theory; history.

LINKS: Jerry Estrin, “Cold Heaven: The Uses of Monumentality” (Guide; PJ 9); Robert Glück, “Truth’s Mirror Is No Mirror” (PJ 7); Bob Perelman, “Three Case Histories: Ross’s Failure of Modernism” (PJ 7); Harry Polkinhorn, “The Failure of a Postmodern Aesthetic” (PJ 7); Ron Silliman, “‘Postmodernism’: Sign for a Struggle, Struggle for the Sign” (PJ 7); Barrett Watten, “The Literature of Surface” (PJ 7); Jason Weiss, “Postmodernism and Music: The Reaches” (PJ 7).