'The tangential point': Pataphysical practice in postwar poetry

摘要

"`The Tangential Point': Pataphysical Practice in Postwar Poetry" argues that Alfred Jarry's (1873-1907) most significant contribution to literary modernism and its aftermaths is his understudied invention: pataphysics. Jarry defines pataphysics variously as "the science of imaginary solutions," "the science of the particular," and "the science of exceptions." Yet, pataphysics resists any clear definition. Pataphysics asserts that we must study exceptions: what a word (or anything else for that matter) might mean as opposed to what it usually means. I am not the first to claim that pataphysics is an important but largely neglected aspect of European modernism. Recently, critics such as Andrew Hugill, Christian Bok, and Alastair Brotchie have all argued that Jarry's pataphysics plays a pivotal role in twentieth-century art and literature. My project, however, argues that pataphysics is particularly important for understanding contemporary North American poetry because contemporary poets use pataphysical techniques to conduct literary experiments that disrupt existing discourses. Each chapter of the project places a particular writing practice in conversation with a correlative pataphysical concept. In the spirit of pataphysics, this methodology focuses on formal and serendipitous relations rather than causal connections. With a conscious awareness that this approach is its own kind of "imaginary solution," I pair four modes of contemporary poetic production---collating, transcribing, writing-through, and programming---with their corresponding pataphysical endeavors: performing disruptions; cataloguing accidental outcomes; proposing imaginary solutions; and positing supplemental worlds. Jarry was fundamental in the conception of these projects by providing a model of writing that described imaginary conceits with scientific precision. Together, the four chapters of "The Tangential Point" give an overview of the most widely used experimental writing techniques of the North American poetic avant-garde as well as a theoretical framework for thinking about the importance of these techniques.