A Prank of Georges
Publication | Critiques
Résumé
THALIA FIELD is the author of three books with New Directions (Point and Line, 2000; Incarnate: Story Material, 2004; and >em>Bird Lovers, Backyard, 2010). She also published numerous journals, most recently Conjuctions, Tin House, Seneca Review, and Angelaki (Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.) Thalia teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University.
ABIGAIL LANG is the author of Le monde compte rendu, Lectures de Louis Zukofsky (ENS editions), and the co-editor of Double Change, A Film Archive of Poetry, 1 and 2 (Motion Method Memory / Presses du reel, 2009). A translator of American poetry into French, she teaches at the University of Paris-Diderot.
Critiques
“In A Prank of Georges, Abigail Lang & Thalia Field create a dazzling set of variations in, about, and around lines from Gertrude Stein. Stein’s lines become threads with which Lang & Field weave a text heterolingual and ludic, in which the play of names becomes a matter of meaning’s performing. The question here is not ‘what the poem says,’ but how it keeps on keeps on saying.”
— Charles Bernstein
“A convoy, a motley, a mob of ‘machines.’ Machines? By George! Gertrude Stein cranks the motor, and we’re off to the carnival, the roller-coaster ride across genres, languages, typefaces – and names. American names especially, where Wilson may come from Witkiewicz and Castle from Katzenellenbogen. It’s dazzling. It’s a riot. It self-deconstructs, but it won’t disappoint you.”
— Rosemarie Waldrop
“For William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail Lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game that leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of ‘various chain.’ Together these poets return us to the primal force of language: naming.”
— Susan Howe
“This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK
“The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course