The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry Reference, Trauma, and History

This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order.

Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality.

Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight.

INTRODUCTION: Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry
PART 1
Post-Communist Traumas, Post-Modernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism

I. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism

1. The Origins and Meanings of Russian Conceptualism

2. The Striptease of Totalitarian Concepts: De-referencing the Communist Idiom

3. Life on the Threshold: Ideological Manipulations of the 1980s

4. Witnessing a Catastrophe: The Sudden Breakdown of Communism

5. The Unforeseen Arrival of the Future. Displacements in a Post-Futurity Modus Vivendi

6. Traumatizing the Mind. Psychological Death of the Subject

7. Conceptualism, Corpora, and History. The Body-Aggregate and the Disarticulated Body

8. Referring to the Loss of Reference

II. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude

1. Denuding and Revoking the Clichés of Communism

2. Surviving an Apocalypse: Testimonies to the Outbreak of Post-Communist Trauma

3. Attaining the Impending. The Temporal and Psychological Displacements
of the Post-Totalitarian Subject

4. Witnessing and Testimony. The Lethal Imagery of Post-Totalitarian Poetry

5. Corpora and History: The Mutilated and Dismembered Body

III. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry

1. Russian Metarealism: The Expansion of Realism and Referentiality

2. Victor Krivulin's Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert) and Novoe zrenie (New Vision)

3. A Poetry of the Threshold: Ol'ga Sedakova's Vrata, Okna, Arki (Gateways, Windows, Arches)

4. Deterritorializing into New Realities: Elena Shvarts's Lotsiya nochi (Sailing Directions of the Night)

5. Conclusion

PART 2
Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in Postmodern American Poetry: The Testimonies of Language Writing

I. The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry

1. The Meanings of Language Poetry

2. The Rapprochement between Language Writing and Russian Postmodern Poetry

3. The Self-Referentiality of Language Poetry

4. Debunking the Referent as Linguistic Equivalent of Commodity Fetishism. The Project of De-referencing Language

II. Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry

1. The Commodification of Poetry

2. Undermining the Instrumental Discourse of Reification: Alternate Linguistic Discourses in Language Poetry

3. Implosive Referentiality. The New Sentence

4. Linguistic Experimentation. “Ludism” as the Unlimited Play of Signification

5. The Revolutionary Charge of Morphemic and Phonetic Disruption

6. Becoming Meaningful: Re-Narrativizing Language Poetry

7. The Semantics of Sound
8. The Referential Potential of Silence

III. The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments

1. Introduction

2. The Wedding of Language Poetry and Media Technology

3. Resisting the Instrumental Discourse of Information Technology: The Production of Linguistic Noise in Charles Bernstein's “Azoot D'Puund”

4. The Unavoidability of Reference. Replicating the Language of Technology. Code as the “Unconscious of Language”

5. Reference, Meaning, and Information

6. Complicating the Vectors of Reference: The Multivalent Referentiality of Language Poetry

IV. Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma

1. Cognitive Overstimulation and Information Overload: The Traumatic Impacts of Media Technology on The Mind

2. The Spasms of Language Poetry: Parataxis as Recording Cognitive Disruption and the Impacts of Trauma

3. Poetic Testimonies to the Genesis of Technological Trauma

4. David Melnick's “Apocalypse of Fragmentation.” Pcoet: A “Conscious Creation” or a “Protosemantic Delirium”?

5. Coping with the Wrong Tomorrow: Testimonies to the Trauma of Temporal
Dislocation in the Age of Media Saturation

6. “Play It Again, Pac-Man”: The Referential Power of Reenactment and “Traumatic Repetition”

V. The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma
1. “Traumas of Code” : The Affinities of Codework and Language Poetry
2. Salvaging the Body from the Structures of Information: Mez's the data][h!][bleeding texts
3. “fleshwords by Ms Post Modemism”: the Therapeutic Function of Code
4. The Experiential Impact of Technological Trauma. Retooling Freud's Notion of the Dead Cortical Layer
5. Reconceptualizing the Notions of Gognition and Experience
VI. Conclusion: Trauma and History

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