Contents Dream (Sun & Moon Classics) - Softcover

Bernstein, Charles

4.42

62 ratings by Goodreads

9780940650565: Contents Dream (Sun & Moon Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940650568 ISBN 13: 9780940650565

Publisher: Sun & Moon Press, 1994

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Content's Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 is the celebrated introduction to language poetry by one of its leading practitioners, Charles Bernstein. First published in 1986, and now a classic study of the poetry and poetics of late-twentieth-century America, this collection of essays conducts us with wit, intelligence, and consummate style through the elaborate relations between language and culture. Bernstein considers verbal, pictorial, and filmic language to understand why writing is never the unmediated expression of personal feeling but always charged with latent meaning.
Addressing a wide range of arts, Bernstein's essays move gracefully from discussions of Mad Max, Stan Brakhage, and Arakawa, to William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky and Jackson Mac Low. Rather than propose grand theories, Bernstein synthesizes the many sets of ideas that are necessary for a practical understanding of contemporary culture. Reading a variety of texts and expanding on his own thinking and method, Bernstein provides a brilliant introduction not only to language writing but to all avant-garde literary ambitions of the last two decades of the century.
At once irreverent and deeply serious, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Stanley Cavell, Content's Dream stakes out a clear cultural and aesthetic position for one extraordinary poet, for language poetry, and for our time.

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About the Author:

Charles Bernstein is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo and cofounder of the journal L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and A Poetics and editor of 99 Poets/1999 : An International Poetics Symposium and Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word .

Review:

Charles Bernstein, poet and co-founding editor of the magazine L= A=N=G=U= A=G=E, has here compiled a selection of his essays and criticism written between 1975 and 1984. The collection as a whole comprises a cogent and comprehensive account of the aesthetic, philosophic, political and cultural views of a group of writers whose work is language-centered and who are often thought of as forming the language movement in poetry which emerged in the early 1970s. Language-centered writing posits that all that is known in the world is language -structured. Bernstein writes that all of the elements of language production and consumption are foregrounded and mobilized in an effort to regain control of language through providing alternate modes of discourse to the currently dominant "techno-rational" mode. By encouraging new ways of approaching reading through non-narrative, multivocal textual productions, these writers hope to propel readers into new orientations of consciousness resulting in new political orientations. In terms of this project, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and culture are all comprehended in language production, writing, poetry. -- From Independent Publisher

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