Abstract
I want to take a moment to more fully set up my own context for reading Language writing, but I want also to provide an introduction to Language writing for those readers who are less familiar with it. Inevitably the tension in this chapter is between glossing over the very real differences among the poets and poems gathered together as Language writing and presenting uninitiated readers with a broad enough characterization of the relevant works and poetics to enable them to continue reading. I recognize as well that my treatment in this book of Language writing as exemplar of our philosophical and cultural situation only exacerbates the risk of presenting it as a monolithic entity. I mean to account for these interpretive strains by marking my own presentation of Language writing in this chapter as a description of its evolution as I understand it (not as an attempt at definition); this acknowledgment will, I hope, allow me to give new readers a critical foothold and show readers with more expertise how, exactly, I am approaching this diverse body of work and establishing the initial terms for my consideration of it.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 129.
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, “Repossessing the Word,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), ix.
Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 58.
Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 365.
Bob Perelman, “China,” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 32.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 29.
George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 42.
Copyright information
© 2009 Joel Bettridge
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bettridge, J. (2009). A Brief History of Language Writing. In: Reading as Belief. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101265_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101265_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38221-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10126-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)