Full Description
In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist "science of imaginary solutions," a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry "made the gesture of dying," Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously.
'Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the Collège de 'Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Décimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O'Dair, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Editors' Note
Introduction: "Unrolled by the Saliva and Teeth of the Water"
Katie L. Price
Part 1: "And Behold, the Wallpaper of Faustroll's Body": Jarry's Pataphysical Invitation
1. Twisted Witz: Experiments in Psychopathology and Humor by Dr. Faustroll and His Pataphysical Progeny
John Heon
2. Pataphallics in Jarry's Novels
Jean-Michel Rabaté
3. Wartime Pataphysics: Postwar Surrealism, the Main à Plume Group, and Boris Rybak's Intraphysics
Catherine Hanson
4. Marcel Duchamp and the Collège de 'Pataphysique
Marc Décimo
Translated by Anne M. Mulhall
5. The Potential Energy of Texts [ΔU = -PΔV]
Craig Dworkin
Part 2: "Like a Musical Score, All Art and All Science": Pataphysics After Jarry and Beyond the Collège
6. Pataphysics in Philadelphia: The Strange Case of James E. Brewton
Michael R. Taylor
7. Circumstantial Evidence: Pataphysical Inflexions in Edward Dorn's Gunslinger and bpNichol's Probable Systems
Steve McCaffery
8. Beyond "Maxwell's Silver Hammer": Pataphysics and Popular Music
Marcus O'Dair
9. Art and the Pataphysics of Exception: Or, How a Sieve Becomes a Time Machine
Ted Hiebert
Part 3: "Written in the Curves of the Limbs": Pataphysical Criticism
10. Reading, Writing, and Rhythmatic
Jerome McGann
11. The Patacritical Demon, Two Decades Later
Johanna Drucker
12. Reflections on Applied Research in Patacriticism: Prism and Reading's Shape
Brandon Walsh
13. The Pataquerical Imagination: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies
Charles Bernstein
Part 4: "Progression to an Infinite Degree Was Prophesized Therein": Pataphysics' Possible Futures
14. Concerning an Unfindable Architecture
Seth McDowell
15. Metabolic Poetics: Writing the Anthropocene
Adam Dickinson
16. Pataphysics and Computing
Andrew Hugill and James Hendler
17. Pataphysics and the Academy
Orchid Tierney
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
