Total Syntax (Poetics of the New) - Softcover

Watten, Professor Barrett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809311798 ISBN 13: 9780809311798

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

Synopsis

Total Syntax is not “literary criticism” in the habitual, apolitical sense of discovering patterns in writing or deal­ing with author’s emotions or overlaying a work’s themes onto a preexisting socio­logical grid. Instead, literature is seen not as an institution but as an act, one in which writing of necessity must remold itself at all points—from syntax between words to the kinds of interactive changes that take place between writer and audi­ence and society.

 

In Watten’s view, there is no frame of reference for writing that writing cannot reach, reevaluate, and transform. The meaning of a sentence, a poem, a literary career, or an entire movement is seen as ceaselessly reinventing itself. Total Synta­x is an insistent attempt to place the act of writing in as wide a context as pos­sible. Throughout the book, a wide range of materials is dealt with, not to make a world out of writing, but to address a larger issue: the transformation of the writer’s role in the actual world.

About this title

About the Author

Barrett Watten is a Lecturer in the Center for Experimental and Interdisci­plinary Arts, San Francisco State Univer­sity. Among his books are Decay, 1–10, and Complete Thought.

Review

“Watten very consciously espouses the Modernist aesthetic, with its push to­ward scientific knowledge of the struc­ture of writing, and its concomitant as­sumption that the writer should know what he or she is doing, and do it, straight­forwardly.”—Bob Perelman, on 1–10

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0809311798
• ISBN 13: 9780809311798
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256