Category Archives: Reading

Formalism and the Masses

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Alan Liu. “The Power of Formalism The New Historicism” in Local Transcedence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. In the peroration to this piece about the space between text and context, the stakes are starkly positioned: To read the … Continue reading →

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Harnessing Language Effects

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Miriam Nichols in “Deep Convention and Radical Chance: The Two Postmodernisms of Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser” in W [dix] a Duncan Delirium published by the Kootenay School of Writing. If theory taught us anything, it is that cognitive liberation … Continue reading →

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Graphograph

Posted on June 23, 2009 by Francois Lachance

chronograph phonograph photograph chirograph A list of words, all containing the suffix -graph, to set in relation to this from Shirley Neuman in Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration. What interested Stein […] was [the] potential for replacing … Continue reading →

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Walking Reading Writing

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Feel free to wander through the alleys and avenues of this paragraph. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau refers to “the long poem of walking” as a series of rhetorical strategies expressed in physical space: at street level … Continue reading →

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OED versus OCR

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Paul Dutton, “Solitude,” from Horse d’oeuvres: Four Horsemen (Toronto: General Publishing 1975) is reproduced in Caroline Bayard’s The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism. It is a concrete poem that functions by substraction. [First line, middle, … Continue reading →

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Foot Work

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Francois Lachance

For a certain generation of gay men, we read with recollected pleasure set pieces that describe the collective and ecstatic experience of a night of dancing. Set pieces like the one below: Twice so far that evening I’d arrived at … Continue reading →

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Detritus

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from Touch by Gabriel Josipovici: For it is never possible to tell in advance where the boundaries will be or even if they exist. Which resonates nicely with this opening line from “The Surprises of the Superhuman” by Wallace … Continue reading →

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Tripping Out

Posted on April 29, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Since you are all readers, you might enjoy a chuckle at this self-reflexive moment from a novel by William Gibson (Zero History). The narrator is describing Milgrim a character who is a recovering addict. Reading, his therapist had suggested, had … Continue reading →

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The Eucharist of Reading

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I suggest to a friend exploring questions of time and identity that they might find this brief summary of Ricoeur by Caroline Bassett useful Ricoeur’s narrative dialectics, in which narrative is at once read as an active and ongoing emplotment … Continue reading →

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Processing Ore

Posted on March 1, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Hesperus has a lovely edition of Proust and Ruskin On Reading. Included in this edition is the lecture “Sesame and Lilies” by Ruskin with notes by Proust. In one passage Ruskin is discussing the difficulty of reading wise men who … Continue reading →

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