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Recommended Reading

(*Intro List) | back

Photography

John Berger
• *Another Way of Telling
Robert Frank
• The Americans
Lee Friedlander
• The American Monument

Poetics

Giorgio Agamben
• The Coming Community
  Experiments with "quodlibet" as a form and an image category (takes up where Barthes' "punctum" leaves off).
Aristotle
• *Poetics
  The origins of the mode; on tragedy.
Maurice Blanchot
• The Writing of the Disaster
The Neutral, the Outside
Michel de Certeau
The Mystic Fable: Vol One. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
The generative operations of the mystic phrase ("circumcision").
Helene Cixous
• Readings: the Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, Tsvetayeva
  Her readings are themselves almost prose poems.
• *Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
  Three schools: the Dead, Dreams, Roots.
Jacques Derrida
• Signsponge
  Locates the signature generating Ponge's poetry.
Martin Heidegger
• Poetry, Language, Thought
Thinking from the gift (ex gibt).
Susan Howe
• The Birth-Mark
  Exemplary fusion of critical and poetic writing by an artist associated with the language poets.
James Michael Jarrett
• Drifting On A Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing
  Invents an interface facilitating composition in a jazz modality.
Craig J. Saper
• Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention
  Using Barthes Empire of Signs as a relay, develops a poetics of mythography

Poetry

Jane Hirshfield
• *Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
  The figure as a logic, a mode of thought
Ezra Pound
• The Cantos
  The vortex as historical strange attractor
Wallace Stevens
• "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
  A verse poetics
William Carlos Williams
• Paterson
  Place, the city, the walk

Rhetoric

Aristotle
• Rhetoric
Roland Barthes,
• *"The Old Rhetoric: an aide-memoire," in The Semiotic Challenge
  Unable to find a useful review of classical rhetoric, Barthes decided to write one.
Kenneth Burke
• A Rhetoric of Motives
  see also: A Grammar of Motives
Bernard Dupriez
• A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z

Theory (Contemporary)

Roland Barthes
• S/Z
  Perhaps the single most useful of Barthes' books (the 5 codes of narrative).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
• Kafka
  Most of the arguments of the "big" books, in brief, applied to Kafka (minor literature).
Fredric Jameson
• The Political Unconscious
  Marx, Greimas, narrative
Julia Kristeva
• Powers of Horror
  Poststructural psychoanalysis: on abjection
Jean-FranCois Lyotard
• The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
  Adapts Wittgenstein's language games to poststructuralism
Peter Sloterdijk
• Critique of Cynical Reason
  Shows the full implications of taking Diogenes seriously as a philosophical prototype

Theory (History of)

Rene Descartes
• *Discourse on Method
  The case for Cogito, ergo sum
Sigmund Freud
• *On Dreams
  The short version; dreams = poetry = logic (conduction)
Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Prince
  Machiavelli does for practical reason what Descartes does for pure reason (theory).
Kark Marx
• The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
  Radical journalism at its best
Friedrich Nietzsche
• On The Genealogy of Morals
  "Genealogy" and the hermeneutics of suspicion
Plato
• *Phaedrus
  The first discourse on method in the Western tradition.
Baruch Spinoza
• Ethics
  Conatus, metaphysics of imagination

Typography

• Erik Spiekermann, E. M. Ginger, Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works,
  font faces express emotion.