Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. PREDICTIONARY is about blank spaces in language and culture and their formative role in conceptual and artistic creativity. It is a dictionary of would-be words that are designed to fill gaps in language and generate new concepts and meanings. Focused on the creative potential of a neologism and a dictionary entry, this book is dedicated to both poetry and poetics.
The concept of lexicopoeia comes from Ralph Emerson: "Every word [lexis] was once a poem." To keep language alive, we must constantly reinvent, rejuvenate, and reanimate it - to imbue it with poetry. This means, in particular: to give birth to new words. One freshly coined word, a "lexicopoem" is the most concise genre of literature, more terse than even an aphorism. The main part of the book includes 150 entries in 14 thematic sections. All new words are supplied with definitions and examples of usage. The theoretical parts, Introduction and Afterword, discuss the word- and dictionary-building process. The author sees the transition from the analysis to the synthesis of language as a most promising path of innovation in contemporary "post-analytic" philosophy and linguistics.
Mikhail N. Epstein is a literary theorist and critical thinker who moved from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1990. He is S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He is Director of Center for Humanities Innovation at Durham University. His research interests include cultural and literary theory, the history of Russian literature and philosophy, Western and Russian postmodernism, semiotics and linguistics, intellectual creativity and new methods and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities, and language evolution and neologisms. His most recent book is
The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). He was founder and director of the Laboratory of Modern Culture in Moscow, and he maintains an array of interdisciplinary websites in the humanities, including (in English)
InteLnet,
Bank of Interdisciplinary Ideas, and
Improvisations (Improvnet).
Mikhail Epstein is the author of 20 books and more than 600 articles and essays translated into 17 languages. His books include After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995), Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with E. Berry, 1999), Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (2002) and books published in Russian: The Philosophy of the Possible (2001) and Word and Silence: Metaphysics of Russian Literature (2006).
Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991); The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions (London); the International Essay Contest (Berlin, Weimar, 1999); and The Liberty Prize (New York, 2000).
