Charles Bernstein
English 583
Fall 2002
Thursdays 12:30pm, 438 Clemens
bernstei@buffalo.edu, 645-3810
office hours Thursday 9:30-11:30, or by appointment

Requirements: Weekly short response paper; one or more longer responses, to be presented in class, to guest speakers or assigned or recommended book. Final paper or project.

Please post responses and additional comments on the seminar reading or classes on our listserve, CORE-L. Participation in CORE-L is an essential part of the class. (Send message to "listserv@listserv.buffalo.edu" that says "sub core-l Jill Jillway" substituting your name for Jill Jillway.)

The Wednesdays at Four series is an integral part of the class. Please attend as possible. Responses in seminar and Core-L may be to the syllabus readings or to these events.

Core Texts

Available at Talking Leaves Books:
Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination
______ The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art
______ Figuring the Word (recommended)
Georges Jean, Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts
Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write
Henry Hills, Making Money
Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow
Yunte Huang, Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry
_______ Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat, eds., Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print
Jerome Mcgann, The Textual Condition
________ The Romantic Ideology (recommended)
________A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (recommended)
Jerome Rothenberg and Steve Clay, eds., A Book of the Book
Rosmarie Waldrop: Selected works
Keith Waldrop: Selected works

Library Reserve:
Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination
Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word
Johanna Drucker and Susan Bee, A Girl's Life
Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, Hans U. Gumbrech, eds. Materialities of Communication

1. (Aug. 29) Introduction
Prehistory / Further Research
Henri Breuil, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art.
Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art.
______, The Dawn of European Art : An Introduction to Paleolithic Cave Painting.
Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, the Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting.
(Note: The books have not been placed on reserve to all for brief check-outs during the semester, also many other books in Lockwood in "N5310" and also search Bison for "petroglyphs".)
LINKS:
The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc
Virtual Lascaux
Comparative iconic database

2. (Sept. 5) The Alphabetic Labyrinth
Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination
and/or:
Georges Jean, Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts (to p. 128) (TL)
[See Drucker bibliography for further reading]
Drucker and Jerome McGann, "Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic"
Jean-Francoise Billeter, from The Chinese Art of Writing in Book of the Book
Further Reading:
Henri-Jean Martin, History and Power of Writing
I. J. Gelb, A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology (1952)
The World's Writing Systems, ed. Peter T. Daniels and William Bright
Andrew Robinson, The Story of Language
Charles Olson: The Chiasma, or Lectures in the New Sciences of Man (1953), published as no. 10 of Olson (Fall 1978); Proprioception (1959-62), in The Collected Prose of Charles Olson (out this Fall), and Pleistocene Man (1965), part of the series "A Curriculum for the Study of the Soul" (Olson recs. by Ben Friedlander)
Paleography and Codicology: Introductory Bibliography
The Internet Sacred Text Archive

3. (Sept. 12) Havelock and the Art of Immemorability
Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write
Charles Bernstein, "The Art of Immemorability" in Book of the Book
Recommended:
Media History Project, including Media Time Line
Dennis Tedlock, "Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability" in Book of the Book
Henry Munn, "Writing in the Imgination of the Oral Poet" in Book of the Book
Further Reading::
Karl Young in Book of the Book
Havelock, Preface to Plato
H. J. Chaydor, From Script to Print: an Introduction to Medieval Literature (1945)
Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word
Paul Saenger, Space between Words; the Origins of Silent Reading
Steve McCaffery and Jed Rasula, eds, Imagining Language
Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (see bibliography)
Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance
On Iconicity, with special reference the work of Max Nänny

4.01 Beta Version. The Medium if not the Messenger is not yet the Masseuse Neither/Or
Marshall McLuhan, The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
_____, Understanding Media: The Extentions of Man
McLuhan Studies journal; see esp. essay on Pound/McLuhan correspondence and Barrelli on Blake
Lecture at Florida State University, 1970
1969 Playboy interview

4.1 (RESCHEDULED for TUES. NIGHT Sept. 17, 7pm) Media and Its Dis(k)ontents: The Poetics of Grammaphony
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Bernstein: "Play It Again, Pac Man" and "I Don't Take Voice Mail"
Further Reading:
Clement Greenberg, Stanley Cavell, Michael Fried, Walter Benjamin on the idea of a medium.
Harold Innis, The Bias of Cmmunication (1951)
M. B. Parker, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation
Susan Vanderborg, Paratextual Communities: American Avant-Garde Poetry Since 1950
Steve McCaffery, Prior to Meaning: the Protosemantic and Poetics
K. Ludwig Pfeiffe and Hans U. Gumbrecht, eds., Materialities of Communication
Media History Project
Recording Technology History
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis
Applied Grammaphon(phan)ology:
Brian Reed, Hart Crane's Victrola Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000) 99-125
Craig Dworkin, Sagetrieb (2002)
Sound Files Index

5. (Sept. 26) McGann
The Texual Condition
"Prologue" to Reimagining Textuality
Rossetti archive
Recommended:
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (at Talking Leaves)
Romantic Ideology (at Talking Leaves)
Radiant Textuality (on resserve) (See e-version of Drucker/McGann "Ivanoe Game" from the book)
Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism

6. (Oct. 3) Drucker
The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art
"The Artist's Book as Idea and Form" in Book of the Book
"Intimations of Immateriality": Graphical Form, Textual Sense, and the Electronic Environment" in Reimagining Textuality
Recommended:
Figuring the Word
A Century of Artists Books
Drucker PMC interview (also available via Project Muse)
Georges Jean, Writing, "Documents" section
Further Reading:
Discovering Artists Books

6.01 Poetry Plastique
Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstien, ed. Poetry Plastique
Experimental - Visual - Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s, ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos, and Johanna Drucker
In Book of the Book: Marjorie Peloff from The Futurist Moment and Sonja Dealauny / Blaise Cendrars, "The Transiberian", Gerald Janecek on Kruchonyk, Khlbnikov, Ducamp, Ernst, Finlay, Jess, Kaprow, Schneemann, and Cayley on Xu Bing
Ubuweb
Eduardo Kac's essay on holographic poetry)
Herbert Spencer, The Liberated Page
Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry
Willard Bohn, Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism
Henry Sayre, The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams
Michel Leiris, tr. Lydia Davis, "Alphabet" in Rules of the Game
Henry Sayre, Robert Frank, eds. The Line in Postmodern Poetry, esp.: "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Lines", Fraser, Hubert
Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (chapter 9)
____The Look of Russian Literature
Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Writings
Dick Higgins, Pattern Poems
Emmet Williams, ed.. Anthology of Concrete Poetry
Milton Kolonsky, ed. Talking Pictures
*
Concrete Poetry Web Index by Michael P. Garofalo

7. (Oct. 10): Steve Clay Visit
Granary Books website
When Will the Book Be Done?: Preface by Bernstein, Introduction by Steve Clay (book is in Poetry Collection)
Selected readings from Book of the Book:
McCaffery/nichols, Keith Smith, Michael Davidson, Simon Cutts. Tom Phillips (and see also Hummament home page), Thomas Vogler
Recommended:
In Book of the Book: Derrida, Blanchot, Sieburth/Mallarmé on Le Livre, Borges, Lawrence Upton
Clay and Rodney Phillips, ed., A Secret Location on the Lower East Side
Jerome Rothenberg and David Guss, eds., The Book: Spiritual Instrument
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book : Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998); "10 Things You Didn't Know about Your Books"
Charles Alexander, ed., Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, and the Book Arts

8. (Oct. 17): Susan Howe Visit
Pierce-Arrow
In Book of the Book: "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values"

9. (Oct. 24): Drucker (12:30pm) and McGann (2pm) Visits
McGann, excerpt from Black Riders in Book of the Book
McGann, "Radiant Textuality" essay.
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker, A Girl's Life (at Lockwood reserve as well as Poetry Collection)
Drucker artist's books in Poetry Collection: particularly recommended: From A to Z, History of the/My World, Simulant Portrait, and/or Word Made Flesh

10. (Oct. 31): Henry Hills Visit
Making Money (TL)
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram", "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form" in Film Form
Dziga Vertov, excerpts from Kino-Eye
from The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney: Vertov, Eisenstein, Antronin Artaud, Maya Deren, Stan Brackage, Peter Kubelka, Ernie Gehr
Stan Brakage, Metaphors on Vision, excerpts

11. (Nov. 7) Reimagining Textuality
Introduction
S ection one -- David Greetham, Deniel Ferrer, Joseph Grigley, Rachel DuPlessis
From section two -- Morris Eaves, Mary Ann Caws, Bernstein
PLUS on Blake: UVa Blake and the Blake Digital Text Project & in Book of the Book: Blake and Erdman on Blake

12. (Nov. 14): Yunte Huang visit
"Was Ezra Pound a New Historicist?: Poetry and Poetics in the Age of Globalization"
Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry
Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation

13. (Nov. 21): A Conversation with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop:
Reproduction of Profile
Lawn of the Excluded Middle
When They Have Senses
A Key into the Language of America
also, esp. in the context of this seminar, her early critical study: Against Language?
plus Waldrop's essay in The Politics of Poetic Form
Keith Waldrop:
The House Seen from Nowhere (new full-length collection, should arrive at Talking Leaves in mid-October)
Potential Random
The Silhouette of the Bridge
Light While There Is Light

14. (Dec. 5) Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies: The Late Age of Print, Listservs and Texual Communities, & the Coming Digital Present
Reimagining Texutality, Part 3: Tim Hunt, Henry Schwartz, Stuart Moulthoup, Gregory Ulmer
Bernstein, Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies
Recommended:
Poetics@, ed. Joel Kuszai
Poetics@, ed. Joel Kuszai -- Roof Books edition
Core-L and Poetics list on-line discussion for this week
Core-l and Poetics archive

14.01 Digital Poetics
Essays:
Loss Glazier, Digital Poetics and (with Ken Sherwood) LINEbreak interview
Bernstein, An Mosaic for Convergence and "Play It Again, Pac Man" (or via Project Muse)
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media (see review by Matt Kirschenbaum )
Michael Joyce, "Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, 'The Ends of Print Culture'" (also via Project Muse)
Issa Clubb, "on the ghost in the machine: the font as spiritual medium in CD-ROM poetry design"
Matt Kirschenbaum, essays: The Cult of Print" on Sven Birkerts (also via Project Muse);. "Lines for a Virtual Typography" (dissertation; email author for password); "What Electronic Texts Are Made of", "Machine Visions: Towards a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence"
Kurt Brereton, "CyberPoetics of Typography" (from Jacket #1)
Bill Marsh, "Reading Time: For a Poetics of Hypermedia Writing" (from Currents in Electronic Literary)
**
Works (updated 7/04)
Caroline Bergvall, Ambient Fish
Brian Kim Stefans, The Dreamlife of Poetry; see also Stefans’s digital picks.
John Cayley, "Indra's Net"  
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, & his home page
Jim Rosenberg's “Diagram Series” see also home page
Jim Andrews’s “Nio”
Jennifer Ley, see for example “Amniotic Meaner”
Leevi Lehto, "When a Car Gets Into an Accident"
Tammy McGovern’s “Order 2001” (wait to load, click on screen, requires SHOCK)
Kenneth Goldsmith, “Fidget”
Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia
InFlect: A Journal of Multimedia Writing
Digital Poetry pages at EPC .
**
Jason Nelson: virtual books; another example