Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 - Hardcover

Bernstein, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940650576 ISBN 13: 9780940650572

Publisher: Sun & Moon Pr, 1986

Synopsis

This reprint appears on its own, without new prefatory material. Bernstein (poetry and letters, State U. of New York, Buffalo) muses on various aspects of contemporary culture and the ideas they embody; he is above all interested in the nature of language, written and verbal. Himself a practitioner of language poetry, Bernstein's essays provide thought-provoking interpretations of late 20th-century approaches to the arts, with consideration of Jackson Mac Low, Louis Zukofsky, Arakawa, and Stan Brakhage, among others. There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

From the Back Cover:

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.

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 .

About this edition

• Publisher: Sun & Moon Pr
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0940650576
• ISBN 13: 9780940650572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 465