Uncreative Writing : : Managing Language in the Digital Age / / Kenneth Goldsmith.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Goldsmith, Kenneth,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 27 illus.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Revenge of the Text -- 2. Language as Material -- 3. Anticipating Instability -- 4. Toward a Poetics of Hyperrealism -- 5. Why Appropriation? -- 6. Infallible Processes: What Writing Can Learn from Visual Art -- 7. Retyping On the Road -- 8. Parsing the New Illegibility -- 9. Seeding the Data Cloud -- 10. The Inventory and the Ambient -- 11. Uncreative Writing in the Classroom: A Disorientation -- 12 Provisional Language -- Afterword -- Notes -- Source Credits -- Index