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Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics of Information

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

Kenneth Goldsmith, a sculptor turned writer who now refers to himself as a “word processor,” makes mundane yet strangely enthralling poetry out of transcribed speech. Rather than stake claims to originality and value, Goldsmith extols “uncreativity” and “being boring” as new benchmarks of literary achievement. So far, critics have abjured these claims in favor of close readings of the texts. This essay aims to take the critical conversation in a new direction by arguing that what deserves critical examination is Goldsmith's attempt to conceptualize and practice poetry as information management. Information culture provides Goldsmith with a new understanding of language, a new view of the literary, and a new take on authorship, and the methods of text production that result from these resources travesty literary culture as we know it, which is exactly the point. Goldsmith's indifference to literary culture yields a method for generating texts that is as instructive as it is shocking because it requires us to face the strange prospect of a literature that chooses information culture over literary culture as its ground.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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