Edited Works
Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art
A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing, including prose, poetry, and the unclassifiable.
A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that explores new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of abstract writing offering readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.
6 x 9 / 540 PAGES / 100 FIGURES & HYBRID ON-LINE COMPANION
ISBN 978-0-8173-6041-2 / $39.95t PAPER
ISBN 978-0-8173-9405-9 / $39.95 EBOOK
“Quick, what do all these things have in common: Language writing and electronic literature, visual writing and sound writing, appropriation, collage and recycling, found textual objects and machine writing? They are all conceptualisms, Steve Tomasula says, and he has assembled this bountiful, beautifully curated anthology to help us see how this is so. Tomasula has a sharp eye, an impeccable ear, a nose for connections and a wicked way with juxtaposition. You already know some of these selections, but I’ll wager there are plenty you don’t know, and in any case you’ll want to have them all in one place on your bookshelf or wherever it is that you keep your archive these days.”
—Brian McHale, author of The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems
“Conceptualisms is a state-of-the-art funhouse of experimental writing. Reading it is like riding a roller-coaster in a hall of narrative mirrors. Its nearly one-hundred selections range from postmodern masters like Gass, Coover, and Wallace to post-literature prophets such as Montfort, Jackson, and Bök. No other collection of innovative writing covers so much ground or is as wildly inclusive. A stunning achievement!”
—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, author of The End of American Literature
“In a time of media multiplicity, we may feel like we’ve had enough of printed books, marble busts, landscape paintings and other windows on the world. Our writing has become multivalenced and our reading is more textured now that we’ve gotten used to texting. Writing both with and against the machine, we situate ourselves conceptually all the time. Steve Tomasula’s anthology is the first book to demonstrate the material and aesthetic range that digital media bring to literary reading and writing. Conceptualisms stands as a codex for our times. Read it through, from start to finish and you will come away with a sense of what literature has become and where the best literary writing can now be found.
—Joseph Tabbi, University of Bergen, Norway and editor, ebr (www.electronicbookreview.com)
Edited Works
&NOW: Writing as Contemporary Art
Drawn from the first &NOW Festival in 2004, an anthology of writing as it is practiced by authors who consciously treat language as a medium with an evolving history, a practice that is aware of its &NOW moment, that is as much about its form and materials as it is about its subject matter; a practice that both emerges from and provides a way to express a world that is now 200 years after Ivanhoe, 100 years after Freud, 50 years after Picasso, 10 years after the birth of www…..
&NOW & Whenever It’s Needed
Described by The Guardian as the ‘most important festival of innovative writing in the U.S. and possibly the world,’ selections from the 2019 Edition of the &NOW Festival are presented in this volume: a gathering of prose and poetry writers, critics, e-poets, mixed-media creators, performers, and other word-artists whose work moves in ways that rework the normal, the status quo, the taken for granted, business as usual, the overlooked….
Image + Narrative, Part 1
A showcase of essays on the theory and/or analysis of writing in which the visual component of a narrative work is germane to its interpretation. The emphasis is on narrative more so than, for example, the artist book as sculpture. Rather, this collection considers books that use their materials and formal concerns as an integral part of narration, especially as it influences interpretation; works that use the grid of the page/screen and typography; works that integrate images as part of the narration; books or stories that tell their stories through commentary of images within….
Image + Narrative, Part 2
An examination of narration as it exists in the environment made possible by new technologies. What do narrative elements like character or plot mean in works of multimedia? What are the poetics of hypertext? What is its rhetoric? What are we to make of the "found art" aesthetic that has entered into fiction? Of issues like indeterminacy and intertextuality? Are we, like readers/writers in quatrocentro Italy about to enter into a debate over how to read Aristotle and thereby transform literary production and criticism? If technology inhered in narratives that worked against the assumptions of realism at the turn of our century, what, if anything, is narration that incorporates contemporary technology working against now? If book technology placed constraints on narrative, what are the constraints of html? Of the computer monitor? How do these constraints manifest themselves in electronic narrative?