Tom Lavazzi

Aesthetic Critical Inquiry
Series Editor: Andrea Feeser

Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-246-9 ($35.99, paperback) 978-1-60235-247-6 ($80.00, hardcover), 978-1-60235-248-3 ($19.99, PDF) © 2020 by Parlor Press. 531 pages.

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Description

Off the Page: Literary and Cultural Criticism as Multimedia Performance blends lyric, theoretic/philosophic, autobiographical, and documentary forms of writing, and then plays on these forms in the arrangement, structure, and visual appearance of the text while also extending this textual performance ‘off the page’ into multimedia mise en scène. The book’s approach to literary and cultural criticism is based on a synthesis of tendencies in postmodern critical and creative writing.  Since the 1960s and 1970s, inspired partly by experiments with intermedia art (especially performances by the international alliance of composers and visual artists, Fluxus) and the advent in America of "ethnopoetics" (investigations into the artistic and/or ritual practices of non-mainstream ethnic cultures—especially Native American—within Western culture), an emphasis on text as performance has emerged.  However, while the avant-garde of American poetics in the post WWII era has been concerned with performing texts, many postmodern American and European literary, cultural, and performance critics and theorists have concentrated on experimentation with textual performance—performative writing.

Challenging, elusive, and brilliant as such creative approaches to critical writing are, the majority of them are textual interventions that stage themselves on the printed page--the amphitheatre of performative criticism, rather than semiotically hybrid, multi-media enactments.  As defined by this collection, performative criticism operates in a somewhat broader formal arena to realize the full potential of mise en scene, or multimedia critical “happenings” (interpretive audio-visual environments integrating image, gesture, sound, music, lighting, voice and objects as well as the spoken and written word), as a strategy for a literary and cultural hermeneutics.

About the Author

TOM LAVAZZI is Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough and directs the critical performance group TEZ: http://www.tezperformance.org. His poetry and criticism appear in such journals as American Poetry Review, Postmodern Culture, Women in Performance, Symploke: Journal of Comparative Literature and Theory, Talisman, Sagetrieb, Midwest Quarterly, The Little Magazine, Mantis: Journal of Poetry, Criticism, Translation; Poetry in Performance, the South Atlantic Review Genre, Post-Identity, and Rhizome: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, among others. He has published three volumes of poetry: Stirr'd Up Everywhere (MOMA/Franklin Furnace, 1995), Crossing Borders (Mellen, 1996), and LightsOut (Bright Hill Press). His one-act play, A Handful of Years was published in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.

Contents

Intro(ductory mani)festo: In Search of the Critical Grail: Performative Sub(di)versions |  Critical Performances | Let's Go Textualizing |  Script 1: Niagara on the Rocks: Fissuring Margaret Fuller | Henry James, and a Strata of Other Voices... |  Audio List |  The Diorama |  Postcards |  Tom’s Appendix |  The Falls: The Movie |  Zoe’s Appendix |  The Bibliography (Select) |  Dialogizing Jurisprudence |  Script 2: Poetic Discourse V. Legal Discourse: The Case |  of Charles Reznikoff |  Slide List |  Deconstructing Product Design | Script 3: The Monroe Project, or, Going Over: the MM Effect |  Audio List |  Monroe/Me (Auto)bio (Zoe Randall, TEZ) |  The Speed of (Re)production |  |  Life: 9/9/57 |  Script 4: The Beat Poetry Games |  Howling Hollywood: | Road Runner Template |  The Poems |  McClure Makeover: | “For the Death of 100 Whales” |  (as re(con)figured by the Product Design Team…) |  Excess Material/Outakes |  |  | Antic Politics |  Script 5: Poetics of Protest: A Fluxed History of the 1968 DNC |  (A Dialogue for Six Academic Voices) | Poetics of Protest [abridged conference version] |  Fluxbits: Fluxbit Protest Fact Sheet (compiled by Christian Herold, |  guest member, TEZ) | Campus Events |  Jeopardizing Academia | Script 6: Stirr'd up Everywhere: Whitman en abime |  Digital Reproduction of Stirr’d Up Everywhere (artist’s book) |  Closing Gestures |  |  Eat, Drink, and be Merry, for the Food of the Performance is Inedible |  Virtual TEZ: Avatars and Acting Bodies, Or | Where Have All the Subjects Gone?: | Notes Toward an Aesthetics of Liminality |  PostFace |  Bibliography About the Author