Dissertation

Reading the illegible

Dworkin, Craig Douglas

1998

Overview

This dissertation begins by insisting that the illegible can indeed be read. Focusing on works that appropriate and then physically manipulate a source text--through erasures, excisions, cancellations, graffiti, rearrangements, et cetera--it documents a remarkable but uncharted tradition of twentieth-century literature and visual art. While mapping the general contours of this tradition, the dissertation focuses on specific poems and artists' books by Charles Bernstein, Guy Debord, John Cage, Susan Howe, Ronald Johnson, Asger Torn, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Jackson Mac Low, Tom Phillips, Armand Schwerner, Robert Smithson, and Rosmarie Waldrop. In addition to offering specific readings of these works--which engage a wide range of subjects including experimental film, communication theory, and linguistic theory--the dissertation makes two broad claims. One is an argument for the way in which the formal elements of a text signify in specific, politically and historically inflected ways; in short, my thesis is that form must always necessarily signify, but that any particular signification is historically contingent and never inherently meaningful or a priori. The other extended argument is for the supple force of paragrammatics: those strategies of reading and writing, like de Saussure's anagrammatic deciphering of classical poetry, which abjure conventional reference in favor of establishing signification according to alternative logics. Demonstrating the relation of paragrammatics to a range of post-structural principles, as well as to George Bataille's influential concept of general economy, the dissertation takes the Situationists' concept of detournement (that hijacking or misappropriating diversion of a pre-existing work so that its means are turned against its ostensible ends) and elaborates the political and historical resonance of such \"misreading.\" In brief, my dual claim is that paragrammatics, as a tactic for both reading and writing, manifests a certain politics within the realm of literature itself, and also that examples of literary paragrammatics provide concrete models for the sort of cultural activities readers might then bring to other aspects of the world around them. In the final analysis, this is a work about (upon) Marcel Duchamp in which he is only ever mentioned, as it were, en passant.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888) / Art history / Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-1867) / British & Irish literature / British and Irish literature / Comparative literature / Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946)
• ISBN: 9780591991680, 0591991683