Description
Book SynopsisA collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.
Trade Review“Continuing and elaborating Alfred Jarry’s notion of ’pataphysics, this collection tracks ’pataphysics’ continued appearances and developments in ensuing avant-garde movements, modern and contemporary art, the intersections of art, literature, and science— and the far-reaching effects of pushing against normative logics and thinking in exceptional ways.”
—Judith Roof,author of What Gender Is, What Gender Does
“’Pataphysics Unrolled looks to be a pataphysically invaluable tome that is an illustration of . . . precisely such pataphysical endeavours as itself, pataphysically.”
—Brian Reffin Smith Leonardo Reviews
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Note
Introduction: “Unrolled by the Saliva and Teeth of the Water”
Katie L. Price
Part 1: “And Behold, the Wallpaper of Faustroll’s Body”: Jarry’s Pataphysical Invitation
1. Twisted Witz: Experiments in Psychopathology and Humor by Dr. Faustroll and His Pataphysical Progeny
John Heon
2. Pataphallics in Jarry’s Novels
Jean-Michel Rabaté
3. Wartime Pataphysics: Postwar Surrealism, the Main à Plume Group, and Boris Rybak’s Intraphysics
Catherine Hanson
4. Marcel Duchamp and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique
Marc Décimo
Translated by Anne M. Mulhall
5. The Potential Energy of Texts [ΔU = −PΔV]
Craig Dworkin
Part 2: “Like a Musical Score, All Art and All Science”: Pataphysics After Jarry and Beyond the Collège
6. Pataphysics in Philadelphia: The Strange Case of James E. Brewton
Michael R. Taylor
7. Circumstantial Evidence: Pataphysical Inflexions in Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger and bpNichol’s Probable Systems
Steve McCaffery
8. Beyond “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”: Pataphysics and Popular Music
Marcus O’Dair
9. Art and the Pataphysics of Exception: Or, How a Sieve Becomes a Time Machine
Ted Hiebert
Part 3: “Written in the Curves of the Limbs”: Pataphysical Criticism
10. Reading, Writing, and Rhythmatic
Jerome McGann
11. The Patacritical Demon, Two Decades Later
Johanna Drucker
12. Reflections on Applied Research in Patacriticism: Prism and Reading’s Shape
Brandon Walsh
13. The Pataquerical Imagination: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies
Charles Bernstein
Part 4: “Progression to an Infinite Degree Was Prophesized Therein”: Pataphysics’ Possible Futures
14. Concerning an Unfindable Architecture
Seth McDowell
15. Metabolic Poetics: Writing the Anthropocene
Adam Dickinson
16. Pataphysics and Computing
Andrew Hugill and James Hendler
17. Pataphysics and the Academy
Orchid Tierney
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
