Reading the Illegible (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces--and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work. Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cege, Jackson MacLow, Ken Campbell, Marcel Broodthaers, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstain, Stan Brekhage, Rosmarie Waldrop, Robert Smithson, Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, Ronald Johnson and Tom Phillips. Dworkin's method seeks to unveil what he describes as "the politics of the poem"--what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, and implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader; and other questions relating to the poem as material object.