The Poetics of the Common Knowledge: (SUNY series, The Margins of Literature)

The Poetics of Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making, that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments 1. A Parable of Beginning Making the Working Space The Fix Radical Modernism Poetic Knowledge An Orientation The Constitution of Life as a Symbolic Machine: Some Sub/Versions 2. Symbolic Nature The Two Cultures The Pursuit of the Infinite Ideal Language The Second House of Culture The Unacknowledged House The Two Languages: Space Compendious Abbreviations Intuition The Equivocations The Two Languages: Time The Cyborg Poetry and the Cartesian Circle Confidence beyond Thought What Is Real Time Linguistics: Cartesian Linguistics: Non-Cartesian Measure 3. Symbolic History The Hegelian Apocalypse The Two Modernisms The End of Poetry, the Beginning of Poetry "Betwixt Unity and Number" Verkehrte Welt Force and Understanding The Final Triumph of Humanism The Tedium of the Absolute he End of History Whitman and the Wrong Infinity Language of Eros Fechner's Experiment The Continuous and the Discrete The Two Modernisms Again How to Read and Write 4. Symbolic Person The Category of the Person Metapsychology Psychodynamism Psychotopography and the Contact Barrier Psychoeconomy and Symbolic Transfer The Performance of Person: Louis Zukofsky The Contingent Person Jargon and the Displacement of the Symbolic Person 5. Symbolic Symbols Society Formal Systems Statistical Reality The Aesthetics of Recursion The Meaning of Recursion The Ethics of Recursion The Modernism that Does Not Become Dated Three Versions of Statistical Reality The Supreme Fiction: The Algebraic Metaphor and Common Language The Comedian as the Letter G: The Lattice of Linked Objects Cognitive Science: Topological Continuity Recurrence Connectionism Statistics and the Single Occasion Nonstatistical Reality Logography: Non-Statistical Writing Construction 6. Beginning Again What Was Right in Metaphysics What Should Have Come First Index

About the Author :
Don Byrd is Professor of English at State University of New York at Albany. He has also written Charles Olson's Maximus; Aesop's Garden; and The Great Dime Store Centennial.

Review :
"Don Byrd's book presents postmodernism as a continuation of the metaphysical skeptical tradition, reaching its dead end with deconstruction. Byrd's alternative in literary studies is a return to poetry as a revitalization of language. The book is very learned, and written with verve and vigor." - Mihai I. Spariosu, The University of Georgia "This is an important, provocative book. At a time when poetics-especially that of the difficult sort dealt with here-has been increasingly pushed to the margins of academic discourse, Don Byrd has come forward with a tour de force that both argues and enacts the bearing of poetic knowledge upon the issues and debates tending to displace it. He not only offers astute, illuminating readings of work by Stein, Zukofsky, Duncan, Olson, and others, but goes to great lengths to map the ground-intellectual, historical, technological, phenomenological-that makes these works matter. Such ground makes his own undertaking on behalf of poetic knowledge purposeful and necessary, and his mapping of it is not only informed, sophisticated and intellectually stunning but passionate and compelling as well." - Nathaniel Mackey, University of California, Santa Cruz