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[…]
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[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/13/2013
This dead letter presents an exploration of the immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari as theorised in A Thousand Plateaus as a means to analysing everyday life. The evidence consists of art, film and objects from life that relate to and suggest the complex ways in which we are affected by traffic jams. Reciprocating substrata[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/25/2012
Carbon dioxide. This small book aims to open a door. It is an experiment in thinking about an object made extremely familiar to many people across the world in recent years through science, the news, governments, and public discourses. One of the first names given to carbon dioxide was spiritus silvestre or wild spirit, a[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 11/29/2012
John Gardner’s career was permanently changed by his publication of On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who found his[…]