Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (cover)

*Iam arranged for the European launch of this groundbreaking new anthology, edited by one of our editors and one of our comrades, as part of our curatorial work for the London Art Book Fair, 2011. Check out Craig and Kenny’s keynote speeches from that weekend in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Big Ideas series

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Edited by Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith

Price $45
ISBN 0-8101-2711-3
Year 2011
Pages 608
Binding perfect bound
Illustration colour illustrated cover; text only inside
Dimensions 152 x 228 mm

Publisher Northwestern University Press

In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways.

In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought.” Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.

Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.