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Prose Architectures
"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles
A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint. Afterword by Fred Moten.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.
—Eileen Myles
A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint. Afterword by Fred Moten.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.
144 pages, Paperback
Published April 30, 2017
About the author
Renee Gladman
30 books271 followersRenee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 2, 2025
from Introduction: Writing Drawing, Drawn Writings
vii ‘through drawing, I had discovered a new manner for thinking. Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language. I saw the act as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if being pulled out of one or let go from one.’
viii ‘I didn’t want to actually draw plans but rather wanted to use the idea of plans, the suggestion of architecture, to point elsewhere: toward a different mode of being where thinking takes the shape of buildings.’
x ‘Language has an energy that eludes these energies in the space between words, between sentences, in the crossing of passages, through the hum of thinking or imagining that shapes the language I’m reading or writing. The dream is often not the text you’re reading but comes from some other part of the page, some part of the text that is not quite visible.’
x ‘How could I inhabit thought as architecture, as a space that could be seen or experienced bodily? How were houses like paragraphs?’
from Afterword by Fred Moten
109 ‘a question Giorgio Agabem articulates: how does a simple fact (a thing; a gesture; a feeling) become an event?’
112 ‘Is there refuge in the sentence? Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?’
vii ‘through drawing, I had discovered a new manner for thinking. Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language. I saw the act as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if being pulled out of one or let go from one.’
viii ‘I didn’t want to actually draw plans but rather wanted to use the idea of plans, the suggestion of architecture, to point elsewhere: toward a different mode of being where thinking takes the shape of buildings.’
x ‘Language has an energy that eludes these energies in the space between words, between sentences, in the crossing of passages, through the hum of thinking or imagining that shapes the language I’m reading or writing. The dream is often not the text you’re reading but comes from some other part of the page, some part of the text that is not quite visible.’
x ‘How could I inhabit thought as architecture, as a space that could be seen or experienced bodily? How were houses like paragraphs?’
from Afterword by Fred Moten
109 ‘a question Giorgio Agabem articulates: how does a simple fact (a thing; a gesture; a feeling) become an event?’
112 ‘Is there refuge in the sentence? Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?’
November 15, 2017
What she said ----> https://hyperallergic.com/397438/draw...
September 10, 2018
Picked this up in hopes that it would give me some insight into the fascinating Ravicka novels; I'd highly recommend reading Prose Architectures as a companion, as the themes resonate heavily throughout the series.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews