Contemporary Poetics

Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

by Louis Armand (Editor)

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study—a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics—this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"—beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century—that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary.

Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice. The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

432 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2007

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).

Reviews

[Litteraria Pragensia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewing "Contemporary Poetics" for Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, Vidhu Aggarwal (Department of English, Rollins College), writes:

Louis Armand's Contemporary Poetics is an ambitious and idiosyncratic compilation (or should I say, ambitious because idiosyncratic) of critical and/or "poetico-critical" writings. It does not limit itself to a discussion of a particular school or arena of poetry (i.e. language or digital poetry), as do the few previous anthologies examining avant-garde poetics, such as Christopher Beach's Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of Poetics (1998), or new media poetics, such as Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss's New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006) or the first and second editions of Eduardo Kac's Media Poetry: An International Anthology (1996 and 2007). With twenty-five pieces ranging from concrete poetics to cyberpoetics, Armand is neither exhaustive nor necessarily inclusive of various poetics, but rather claims to offer a provisional examination of contemporaneity. While the anthology privileges disjunctive poetics, viewing the contemporary in a continuum with such movements as Futurism, Oulipo, and Fluxus, Armand hopes to delineate "a possible poetics of the contemporary" arising out of the "technological condition" of the present which he calls "the time of writing" (xiii). For instance, Armand gives the example of the transatlantic telegraph in the late nineteenth century as forming New York, London, and Paris as contemporaries, as being of the same time. In the "Editors Introduction: Transversions of the Contemporary," Armand allows that the sense of the contemporary or "the present" is itself a historical formation, a condition arising from the technological shifts in communications, transportation, and production flows that allows for a sense of simultaneity in terms of locations, times, and practices.

*Read the entire review at: http://www.hyperrhiz.net/reviews/58-l...

[Rachel]

I'm giving this 3 stars after the intro and half of one essay. A history of avant-gard language theory and relationships to innovative experimental prose movements, individuals. Much desired historical material for me. Sanity inducing. What have you.