Craig Dworkin
Price: £15+p&p
ISBN: 978-1-907468-34-6
Year: 2018
Edition: 500
Pages: 112pp
Binding: softback
Illustration: red, black & white text only
Dimensions: 170mm x 245 mm
Starting with a passage from Gottlob Frege, Craig Dworkin replaced each of the words in Frege’s sentence with its dictionary definition. He then replaced each of the words in that new sentence with its dictionary definition, and then each of the words in the resulting sentence with its dictionary definition, and so on. DEF presents five iterations of the process using the Oxford English Dictionary and another five using the first, 1806 edition of Noah Webster’s Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.
DEF thus follows a proposal that Raymond Queneau called “definitional literature” and that Stefan Themerson called “semantic literature.” With precedents including a collaboration between Georges Perec and Marcel Bénabou, the rule-based technique became one of the hallmarks of the Oulipo. However, where earlier experiments were only ever tentative and limited, DEF carries their suggestions through to a marathon extreme — with a trajectory aiming at the physical limits of the bound book itself.
Structured like an hourglass, DEF begins with the longest of the O.E.D. sentences (at almost forty-five-thousand words) and hones in to asymptotically approach the vanishing point of the Frege source before expanding back out with the Webster versions. Although written manually, in order to provide the document of a readerly performance of consulting the dictionary, the project’s enactment in our current moment of algorithmic networks and scripted computer texts finds the nascent concerns of the mid-century avant-garde to be newly relevant.
DEF is generously supported with a grant from the Henry Moore Foundation.
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13 March 1911
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Def.
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Weaving Language
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Catch-words
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On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless
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Perfect Love
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Last Words
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Reading Matters
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Eulogy for David Antin in English English
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Calvariae Disjecta: The many hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall
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Reading as Art
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Twelve Erroneous Displacements and a Fact
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Cartography for Girls
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Correcciones
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Magritte for Cheerleaders
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(Expanded Second Edition)
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Nothing: A User’s Manual
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Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head
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Spanish Do or DIY translation
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German Do or DIY translation
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The Nabokov Paper
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I, Sparkie
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Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts from Popular Forms
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Learn to Read Differently
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Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right
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Page 141 2
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Jaap Blonk, Poet-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Garry Neill Kennedy, Artist-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Freud on Holiday: Appendices III and IV, plus full wrapped set
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Pigeon Reader
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Enchiridion: three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan in NE Scotland
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Do or DIY – exhibition 2
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Do or DIY – pocketbook
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Do or DIY – exhibition 1
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Sucking on Words poetry readings
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The Man Booker Shortlist Quiz!
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Reisen II
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Exercise in Pathetic Criticism
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The Persons
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Freud’s Weather
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Howl #16
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Have a Peck at Perec, tote bag
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Frued’s Dining
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Bibliomancy: Lotsa Fun For All The Family
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The Forgetting of a Proper Name
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Summer School for Literary Perverts
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Poetry Readings in Leeds
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Instruction Manual
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information as material residency
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Re-Writing Freud app
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Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
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Making Nothing Happen DVD
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The Perverse Library
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The Perverse Library exhibition
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Robert Fitterman & Kim Rosenfield Residency
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Freud and the Gift of Flowers
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Reisen I
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THE IDEOLOGY OF DAVID CAMERON’S PARTY
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Marie-Josée Jean & Klaus Scherübel Residency
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THE DIE IS CAST
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He
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Historico-naturalis et Archaeologica ex Dale Street
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Craig Dworkin Residency
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The Voice and Nothing More: an academic mash up
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Spinning Vol. II: De-Centering the Self
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A Perverse Library
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An Agent of the Estate
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A Disturbance of Memory
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Iam Survey Exhibition
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A One Day Bookshop for Experimental Literature
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Kenneth Goldsmith Residency
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sucking on words DVD
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Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy)
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L’esprit d’escalier
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We Report Here
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Deciphering Human Chromosone 16: Index to the Report
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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
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Reading the Remove of Literature
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Thesaurus Scienta Lancastriae
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Freud Dreams of Rome
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Re-Writing Freud
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The Answer to the Question
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Royal Road to the Unconscious
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bibliomania 2000-2001
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Interpretation vol.I
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Interpretation vol. II
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bibliomania 1998-1999