U B U W E B Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song. Or at least thats the story weve inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 2. Its a story we all know so well that the terms of its once avant garde formulation by William Wordsworth are still familiar, even if its original manifesto tone has been lost I have said, he famously reiterated, that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. But what would a non expressive poetry look likeA poetry of intellect rather than emotion One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with spontaneous overflow supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process In which the self regard of the poets ego were turned back onto the self reflexive language of the poem itselfSo that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better the question of the workshop, but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise. The works presented here provide one set of answers to those questions. Moreover, from the modernist experiments of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett to the neodadaism of Fluxus, they hint at the range of alternatives and challenges that have been presented to the Romantic lineage of expressive poetry. This collection intends to both recall those traditions and complicate their multiple and intersecting histories. In the social context of its publication, for instance, Alan Davies a an av es is part of the published record of Language Poetry. At the same time, its mode of composition also gestures towards LOuvoir de littrature potentielle The Workshop for Potential Literature, or Ou. Li. Po for short. The work is a multiple lipogram known as the prisoners constraint, in which only letters without ascenders or descenders are permitted perhaps to be able to write in closely spaced lines and conserve the prisoners ration of paper, or, more fancifully, to be free of the bars even of letters. Similar crossings occur in Tomoko Minamis 3. Walter Abish, in works such as Alphabetical Africa and especially 9. The New Meaning, as well as the syllabic rearticulations of Kenneth Goldsmiths No. Wu Guanzhong 19192010 stands as one of the most important artists of twentiethcentury China. Born in Jiangsu Province, Wu studied art at the National Academy of. Marxism. A sociological approach to literature that viewed works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be. UbuWeb TEXTS. Craig Dworkin Kenneth Goldsmith Against Expression An Anthology of Conceptual Writing Introductory Essays Table of Contents 2011. At the same time, the writerly pleasures of 3. Likewise, Christian Bks String Variables combines the permissions granted by post Language Poetry lyricism with the constraints of the Ou. Li. Po. It takes the form of a charade, in which alphabetic characters are respaced but not reordered, effecting what the Russian Futurists called sdvig the shift of verbal mass within a text. One should not forget the Ou. Li. Pos origins in the College de Pataphysique, and that lettristic shift in String Variables might equally be seen as the swerve of Alfred Jarrys clinamen the chance swerve of one element of a system that results in a reengineering of the whole. That swerve, in short, bends the rules of the game but continues to play. T/T01/T01957_9.jpg' alt='Formalism In Art Pdf' title='Formalism In Art Pdf' />Indeed, many of these works embody the misapplied rigor and alternative logics of Jarrys pataphysics the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. Jarrys science investigates the probabilities and necessities of a certain situation, to borrow from Aristotles definition of poetry, and it accordingly studies particulars, singularities, and exceptions with an absurd necessity, projecting those moments through their logical extremes. Pataphysics combines incompatible systems as though they were natural extensions of one another or it establishes structures and allows them to exhaust their own possibilities or it puts pressure on closed systems until the logic of a particular form devours itself in an oroborian autophagy. In other words, pataphysics is the mental version of Yves Kleins saut dane le vide leap into the void, or Bas Jan Aders second Fall executed exactly a decade later, in 1. Jarryesque bicycle into the brack of an Amsterdam canal. Formalism In Art Pdf' title='Formalism In Art Pdf' />Like Ader, the majority of the writers here were participants in the set of contemporaneous practices that came to be known as Conceptual Art. I want to stress, however, that this anthology is not meant to be a collection of writings by conceptual artists but a collection of distinctly conceptual writing. There are many works of conceptual music, for instance, but John Cages Cheap Imitation like the third movement of Todd Levins Between My Mouth And Your Ear, which was derived by erasing the accidentals in one of Iannis Xenakis scores is an essentially written work and not just because it has been scored. Accordingly, one might expand the sense of writing here to include a works like Ceal Floyers Ink on Paper 2. Dvid Nez 1. 97. Such works manifest some of the tensions in this collection between materiality and concept. These works negotiate between the modernist emphasis on the material of art in many cases here that means the materiality of language itself and a post modernist understanding of a theoretically based art that is independent of genre, so that a particular poem might have more in common with a particular musical score, or film, or sculpture than with another lyric. Similarly, these works remind us that the dematerialization of the art object in the late 1. Robert Smithson put it. My sense of language, Smithson summed up, is that it is matter and not ideas i. In sum A Heap of Language. Accordingly, the conceptual writing collected here is not so much writing in which the idea is more important than anything else as a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing the material practice of criture. Conceptualizing writing in that way returns us, perhaps surprisingly, to a poetry of form. But not to a form to the received forms of sonnets and quatrains and the like, with their familiar schemes of stress and rhyme. Instead, the new forms and structures of conceptual writing recall the sense of artifice, constraint, and perversity that the sonnet too must once have embodied. Conceptual writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period Lucy Lippard documented in her invaluable Six Years 1. Dan Farrell and Mnica de la Torre. For all of the ground suggested by this expanded field, the expected disclaimer far from complete or archival, this collection is meant as a small preview gallery or first sampler of conceptual writing. From here, interested readers might move out in a number of directions to Robert Morris 1. Card File collection Muse National dArt Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris to Frank Kuenstlers extraordinary book In Which to Gyrgy Ligetis pome symphonique for 1. Michael Snows video Fridge to the perl scripted Apostrophe Engine of Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler Henry to well beyond. In the end, this collection is an attempt to remember the end of Wordsworths sentence poetry is that form which does itself actually exist in the mind. Or, to put this all another way This is an essay about Robert Rauschenberg if I say so. Russian formalism Wikipedia. Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movements members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art. Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, Russian Formalism describes two distinct movements the OPOJAZ Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the Russian Formalists, rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of Formalism. The term formalism was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Distinctive ideaseditRussian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a scientific method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural historical approaches. As Erlich points out, It was intent upon delimiting literary scholarship from contiguous disciplines such as psychology, sociology, intellectual history, and the list theoreticians focused on the distinguishing features of literature, on the artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing The New Princeton Encyclopedia 1. Two general principles underlie the Formalist study of literature first, literature itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities, must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory second, literary facts have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism, whether philosophical, aesthetic or psychological Steiner, Russian Formalism 1. To achieve these objectives several models were developed. The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavor consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose, recognizable by their artfulness and consequently analyzing them as such. Mechanistic formalismeditThe OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the Formal method and focused on technique and device. Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines they are the result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a particular purpose Steiner, Russian Formalism 1. This approach strips the literary artifact from its connection with the author, reader, and historical background. A clear illustration of this may be provided by the main argument of one of Viktor Shklovskys early texts, Art as Device Iskusstvo kak priem, 1. Shklovskys main objective in Art as Device is to dispute the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time. Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, whereby it was then interpreted in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an authors world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. In both cases, literature is not considered as such, but evaluated on a broad socio political or a vague psychologico impressionistic background. The aim of Shklovsky is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature or poetic language these, as we saw, are the devices which make up the artfulness of literature. Formalists do not agree with one another on exactly what a device or priem is, nor how these devices are used or how they are to be analyzed in a given text. The central idea, however, is more general poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analyzed as such. Some OPOJAZ members argued that poetic language was the major artistic device. Shklovsky, however, insisted that not all artistic texts de familiarize language, and that some of them achieve defamiliarization otstranenie by manipulating composition and narrative. The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and non art. Therefore, its notions are organized in terms of polar oppositions. One of the most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and sjuzhet. Story, fabula, is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot, sjuzhet, can unfold in non chronological order. The events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism, gradation, and retardation. The mechanistic methodology reduced literature to a variation and combination of techniques and devices devoid of a temporal, psychological, or philosophical element. Shklovsky very soon realized that this model had to be expanded to embrace, for example, contemporaneous and diachronic literary traditions Garson 4. Iran Maps For Garmin Gps on this page. Organic formalismeditDisappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists adopted the organic model. They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary phenomena in two different ways as it applied to individual works and to literary genres Steiner, Russian Formalism 1. An artefact, like a biological organism, is not an unstructured whole its parts are hierarchically integrated. Hence the definition of the device has been extended to its function in text. Since the binary opposition material vs. Zhirmunsky augmented it in 1. Steiner, Russian Formalism 1. The analogy between biology and literary theory provided the frame of reference for genre studies and genre criticism. Just as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre Steiner, Russian Formalism 1. The most widely known work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir Propps Morphology of the Folktale 1. Having shifted the focus of study from an isolated technique to a hierarchically structured whole, the organic Formalists overcame the main shortcoming of the mechanists.