Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (Postmodern Culture) - Softcover

Amato, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791434028 ISBN 13: 9780791434024

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1997

Synopsis

Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Amato completed his undergraduate degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering at Syracuse University, and his Master of Arts and doctoral degrees in English at University at Albany. A licensed professional engineer in New York State, he spent seven years in industry working in various project engineering capacities. Amato is the author of nine books: Samuel Taylor's Last Night (novel, Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming); Big Man with a Shovel (novel, Steerage Press, 2011); Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (memoir, SUNY Press, 2009); Pain Plus Thyme (poetry, Factory School, 2008); Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (criticism, University of Iowa Press, 2006); Under Virga (poetry, Chax Press, 2006); Finger Exorcised (poetry, BlazeVOX [books], 2006); Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (criticism, SUNY Press, 1997); and Symptoms of a Finer Age (poetry, Viet Nam Generation, 1994). With Kass Fleisher, Amato is the author of three award-winning screenplays and, most recently, a full-length play, Fat Jack's. Amato and Fleisher have also adapted Big Man for the screen. Amato currently teaches writing and literature at Illinois State University.

From the Back Cover

"Bookend sets the stage for a new kind of writing." -- Marjorie Perloff

"Joe Amato's passionate, acrobatic, and audacious engagement with the limits of discursiveness aims to repixelate our reception of virtual culture. Like a test pattern coming from just beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy, Bookend's static is a call for us to readjust our sets." -- Charles Bernstein

"Situated somewhere between the world of print and cyberspace, Amato's Bookend is an amazing read -- fast, provocative, learned, hypertextual, fun." -- Gail E. Hawisher

"This is a difficult book aware of its joys; a joyful book aware of its difficulties." -- Michael Joyce

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791434028
• ISBN 13: 9780791434024
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190