Conceptualisms Anthology: Prose, Poetry, Visual & Hybrid Writing in Contemporary Art - Perfect for Art Students, Collectors & Modern Literature Enthusiasts
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Product Description
A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live. The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.
Customer Reviews
Conceptualisms is a stunning anthology of contemporary conceptual writing. I highly recommend the volume to anyone thinking about, writing about, teaching, or otherwise engaging with the cutting-edge of experimental writing today. Not only for the breadth and depth of ground covered within, but for the very smart curatorial framing of the anthology itself:Any anthology is an exercise in defining a genre (just as an anthology of Romance literature would have to define what exactly qualifies as “romance”). Yet, as the plural (conceptualismS) title implies, part of the work that this anthology does, is resist/interrogate/play with such a drive to define and narrow the horizon of what counts as “conceptual writing.” As editor Steve Tomasula writes in the introduction, each individual piece in the anthology is more a “proposition for how to make and think about art, each an articulation of its own particular concepts.” That is, the anthology as a whole offers an argument to think about conceptual writing as an invitation to find the norms governing the ways we speak and write, and then bend them. “The tradition of conceptual writing seems less like a movement (the avant-garde), or period (postmodernism), than an open-ended activity.” As such, this book is a breathtaking tour of contemporary writing that tries to reveal the subterranean layers that give the surface its form: How do “we” arrive at the commonsense language that goes unquestioned; the norm that makes anything that breaks from it seem odd? Authors include poet Claudia Rankine, Korea-US collective Heavy Industries, the “Shout Artist” R. Henry Nigl, and many many more.Besides engaging with the idea of experimental, conceptual, hybrid writing, the anthology is also a hybrid in and of itself. The book is linked to a website that hosts not only short introductions of each piece, written by their authors, but also is home to the electronic, web-based, and otherwise internet-oriented pieces included in the book. Readers come away with a sense of the expansive, playful, and fully open-ended proposition that is language today. I cannot recommend the anthology enough. Thank you to each of the authors collected within, and to the talent of its editor to put it all together.
