Published: 03/28/2013
Inspired by a passage in Vladmir Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), and also compiled as a future love letter to The Material Collective, the essays collected here play with the transparency of pedagogy, scholarship, and writing, as well as with objects that can be seen through, such as crystals and stained glass. As Nabokov wrote, When[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/28/2013
Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing re-imagines figures of ontological totality, in and out of writing, first by exploring some lineages of the dialectic, and second by engaging thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and his assertion of nonidentity, Julia Kristeva and her positing of a fourth term of the dialectic, and Fredric Jameson’s[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 05/23/2013
A Sanctuary of Sounds is an aural rewriting of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931). A polyphonic object. A garden — assemblage of blooms, of affects, of sounds, of meaning. An invitation to rethink appropriation ethically, aesthetically, and epistemologically. The appropriation of a body of work, of a physical body, of an idea, of data. The[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/28/2013
In the dead letter office, you will find a Memoir American. The texts which comprise it — forms of essay, talk, dialogue — at one time saw themselves as individualists who went somewhere (to small press magazines) on their own. Now they are here, collected with the chance of going nowhere together. As it should[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/26/2013
Access interactive companion web-book here. Italo Calvino rewrites Baudrillard’s America with a more global eye, as edited by Roland Barthes. In Divisible Cities takes Italo Calvino’s classic re-imagining of Venice, viewed in the mind’s eye from many different metaphysical angles, and projects it on to the world at large. Where the Italian saw his favorite[…]
Published: 02/06/2013
This edition has been produced jointly with: FICUNAM (International Film Festival of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) Where is the film analysis today? What are you doing, in the dark, the theory of cinema? This field, as it has been professionally defined (at least in the Anglo-American academic world), is currently divided between historians[…]
Published: 07/18/2013
Repetitions / Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary [2 vols.] by Scott Abbott and Žarko Radaković (translation of portions of Repetitions by Ivana Djordjević; translation of Vampires by Alice Copple-Tošić) See Vol. 2: Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary HERE. In 1994, after following a character in Peter Handke’s novel Repetition into what is now Slovenia and after[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/24/2012
Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by[…]