With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message.
Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.
With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message.
Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.
List of Figures
Introduction
One The Prosaic Imagination
Two The Onomastic Imagination
Three The Logic of the Work (on P. Inman)
Four The Logic of Print (on Russell Atkins)
Five The Logic of Spacing (on N. H.
Pritchard)
Six The Logic of Registration (on Andy
Warhol)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Reading the Illegible, No Medium, and Dictionary Poetics, as well as ten books of poetry, most recently, The Pine-Woods Notebook.
“We count on Dworkin to say the smartest things about
contemporary poetics, so the smartness of Radium of the
Word comes as no surprise. What does come as a surprise
is the book's first sentence: ‘This book proposes a
methodology.’ And it does not disappoint. Dworkin is
reinventing the practice of reading by unscrewing the
locks on its doors. Not close, not distant, not surface,
not formal, not historical, not reparative, not paranoid
reading. This book bypasses adjectives and heads straight for the
nouns: the death penalty, paper cuts, opera queens, gossip, songs,
riots, print, quotation marks, homelessness, names, the typeset
line, spaces, prose. Oh, and poetry. This is a difficult book that
everybody should read.”
*Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine*
“Dworkin is the closest reader we have. In startling, revelatory,
and delightful essays on an astonishing range of writers and
artists, Dworkin resists the systematic and canonical in pursuit of
the peculiar, specific, and particular. Radium of the
Word proposes a radically new approach to reading poetry,
focusing on textual features that are not necessarily intentional.
This book will be of importance to scholars of modernist and
avant-garde literature, postwar African American poetry, and anyone
interested in contemporary poetics.”
*Charles Bernstein, author of 'Near/Miss' and 'Topsy-Turvy'*
"At a moment when claims for the thematic achievements of poetic
language (cognitive mapping, climate graphing, racial and sexual
tracking, worldmaking, self constructing, cultural undoing,
consciousness raising, history transcending) are even more extreme
than they were two years ago when this book came out, we have never
needed Dworkin’s weird lens on poetry more."
*Critical Inquiry*
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