The Constructivist Moment

Winner of the American Comparative Literature Association's Rene Wellek Prize (2004)


As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno-each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

NEW MEANING AND POETIC VOCABULARY: FROM COLERIDGE TO JACKSON MAC LOW
Poetic Vocablary
Coleridge's Desynonymy
Zukofsky's Dictionary
Mac Low's Lexicons
New Meaning
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE EQUAL SIGN: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND TEXT
Avant-Garde Paradox
Postrevolutionary Poetics
Legend's text
Multiauthors (M)
Multiauthors (F)
Multiauthors and the Listserv
THE BRIDE OF THE ASSEMBLY LINE: RADICAL POETICS IN CONSTRUCTION
The Descent
Cultural Poetics
Stein's Ford
assembling This
The Bride
THE CONSTRUCTIVIST MOMENT: FROM EL LISSITZKY TO DETROIT TECHNO
The Great Divide
Lissitzky's Examples
Constructivist Poetics
Detroit Techno
Moments
NONNARRATIVE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY: AN ERA OF STAGNATION, THE FALL OF SAIGON
Nonnarrative Poetics
The Construction of History
An era of stagnation
The Fall of Saigon
Nonnarrative Ending
NEGATIVE EXAMPLES: THEORIES OF NEGATIVITY IN THE AVANT-GARDE
Negativity
Dark Matter
The nothing That Is
Limit Situations
Negativities
POST-SOVIET SUBJECTIVITY IN SRKADII DRGOMOSHCHENKO AND ILY KABAKOV
After the Fall
Kabakov's Kommunalka
Post-Soviet/Postmodern
ZONE: THE POETICS IN POSTURBAN DETROIT
The Postmodern Turn
The object of Spiritual Fantasy
The Modern as Spatial Fantasy
Voundaries as Subject
Social Space and Negativity
Gaps between Terrains
Art and Negativity
Negativity and Social Space
For a critical regionalism
Site and Nonsite
Douglas's Le Detroit
Posturban Detroit