Radium of the Word

A Poetics of Materiality

Radium of the Word
Craig Dworkin
RRP:
NZ$ 79.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 63.20
Paperback
Not defined - 264pg
17 Dec 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226743561
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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.
"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' " "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"
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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226743561
Published: 17 Dec 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 9mm
Width: 6mm
Spine: 1mm
Pages: 264

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information