for information on the pdf, from Green Integer / Sun & Moon, go here. Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984A celebrated introduction to
contemporary American poetics by one of its leading practitioners.
at Google Books: preveiw
"Maintaining Space (on Clark Coolidge) First published in 1986, and now a classic for all who care about the poetry and poetics of the late twentieth-century, Content’s Dream is a witty, consummately intelligent, and ever stylish collection of essays by one of the country’s most innovative and influential poets, whose work has come to be associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited at the time these essays were being written. Addressing a wide range of arts and ideas, Bernstein moves rapidly from philosophical reflections on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, to the film antics of Mad Max and the cinema of Stan Brakhage, from the paintings of Arakawa to the poetics of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, from modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and Louis Zukofsky to the contemporary poetry of Jackson Mac Low, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman. Bernstein’s essays are poetic enactments rather than abstract theories, embodying in the way they are written the aesthetic values they passionately and eloquently express. While providing an essential introduction to the innovative poetry and poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bernstein’s investigations center on the relation of art to politics and specifically the politics of poetic form. He also explores the conditions, experiences, and alienation of everyday life and the ethical traps of characterization and representation. Bernstein imagines a “thinking” poetry of both process and critique that acknowledges – and responds to – the intractability and complexity of contemporary cultural and social problems. At once irreverent and politically engaged, complex and comic, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Karl, Content’s Dream is essay writing at its most exuberant and profound. “Certain works are recognized as defining an epoch. . . .Postmodernism is now a distinctly articulated cultural formation.Within it, Content’s Dream has been without question one of its defining critical and aesthetic documents.” —Jerome McGann, University of Virginia “A terrific manifestation of an exemplary contemporary intellectual forging what we might consider a conscience for his time.” —Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley “[Content’s Dream] is the most exciting and challenging book of
essays I have read in quite some time. The range of reference, style, and
thought makes for stimulating reading, the kind that inevitably leads to other
reading (as well as re-reading).” —Hank Lazer, Missouri Review avant-garde and modernism Marjorie Perloff and Rainer Rumold, Series Editors Charles Bernstein is Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.. He is the author ofRepublics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon,
2000), My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999) and A Poetics (Harvard, 1992) and editor of 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Duke, 1999) and Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford,
1998). Literary Criticism / Art Criticism March. 2001 Paperback reprint Trim size/# of pages ISBN 0-8101-1845-9 paper / $24.95
Contents One/The Secret of SyntaxThree or Four Things I Know about Him
Semblance
Stray Straws and Straw Men
A Particular ThingStyle
The Dollar Value of Poetry
Thought’s Measure
Two/Film of Perception
Frames and Reference
Words and Pictures
Three/Reading, Person, Philosophy
The Objects of Meaning:Reading Cavell Reading
Wittgenstein
Meaning the Meaning:Arakawa’s Critique of
Space
The Stadium of Explanation
On Theatricality
G--/
Writing and Method
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