The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination

Michael Golston

ISBN 10: 0817361006 / ISBN 13: 9780817361006

Editore: Univ Of Chicago Behalf Of Univ Of Alabama Nov 2023, 2023

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Neuware - 'This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language. The germ of Golston's project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson's Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: 'The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of 'low budget' mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance.' Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde. Golston creates what he calls a 'regular Rube Goldberg machine' of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists. Golston's critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more 'alien' terrain: Ed Dorn's long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston's restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form'.

Codice articolo 9780817361006

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination
• Editore: Univ Of Chicago Behalf Of Univ Of Alabama Nov 2023
• Data di pubblicazione: 2023
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0817361006
• ISBN 13: 9780817361006
• Rilegatura: Taschenbuch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 229 L x 152 A x 23 P (millimetri) 229 millimetri di larghezza per 152 millimetri di altezza per 23 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 272 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

How the tropes of science fiction infuse and inform avant-garde poetics and many other kindred arts

This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language.

The germ of Golston’s project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson’s Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: “The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of ‘low budget’ mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance.” Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde.
Golston creates what he calls a “regular Rube Goldberg machine” of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists.

Golston’s critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more “alien” terrain: Ed Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston’s restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form.
 

Informazioni sull?autore

Michael Golston retired as professor of English at Columbia University in 2021. He is author of Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form and Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science.