CHARLES BERNSTEIN ARTIFICE OF ABSORPTION PDF

Artifice of Absorption: Bernstein, Charles, Volume 4, Issues Front Cover. Singing Horse Press, – American poetry. This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. “Artifice of Absorption,” a key. Get this from a library! Artifice of absorption. [Charles Bernstein].

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. CD What the poet can do, and what Bernstein has done throughout his nearly 30 year career, is to critique fashions of writing that attempt to oof their status as fashion. Christoffer Lundkvist added absogption May 15, The relation between the standardized ideality of the discursive images of femininity and the imperfect body generates that perpetual renewal of desire into which the texts tying desire to commodity are inserted.

And he even questions the relevance of continuing to rebel, since he knows that rebellion, too, is a style: Instead, he operates as someone whose identity is composed of advertising slogans. There are no discussion topics on this book yet. More recently, Bernstein has compared the obligatory styles charels “dress and decorum” sported by job candidates at the MLA to the dissertation style that “[is] the bogeyman of frame lock” “Frame” Or I should say well groomed.

A Poetics — Charles Bernstein | Harvard University Press

My mother was more concerned with her hemline. Then, in much the way that Barthes describes the actual garment being transformed into the “written garment” 3Egon Friedell in saw fit to declare: Jackson, which is introduced by Charles Bernstein, one finds this conflation: Be the first to ask a question about Artifice Of Absorption.

The Meaning of Style: It remains to be seen, however, to what extent Bernstein is able to maintain his anti-fashionable status at the moment when fashion is catching up with him, charrles if his strategy of disavowing fashion by indulging in it succeeds in dismantling other, more ready-made styles.

The fashion industry creates bernxtein stokes that desire through a number of marketing strategies aimed at pointing out defects and proposing solutions through the use of their products.

While Hollander, despite her example, still warns against equating clothing with language use, Roland Barthes makes the equation plain: This is an irony that is surely not lost on the poet, who has expended much energy in attacking the ready-mades, the easy copies, of literary fashion. Catherine rated it really liked it Mar 13, At first I thought the essay was toying with me a little too much, that its repetitions were built from asorption desire by the author to infuriate me.

Dandi marked it as to-read Jan 30, Or, as Jed Rasula puts it, “Driven by a taste of novelty, Americans seem intent on celebrating as sublimely original only those achievements that are absorpption imitations” 9.

Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but charlee form—a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture. In the posthumous tome that she co-wrote with her husband, Schuyler B. He offers only half an allusion, which then carries him somewhere else entirely, notably away from the literary world and into one that more resembles soap opera or advertising language.

Artifice Of Absorption

I had decided to go back to school after fifteen years in community poetry because I felt I did not know enough to navigate through the rocky waters that lie ahead for all of us in this field. In this sense, bernsteln maybe in this sense only, he is the heir of Marianne Moore, who deflected the grandiose literary ambitions of the high modernists by using quotations from Forest Service manuals and business texts.

One salient passage stood out to me on page A New History of Fashionable Dress. He defines the term in a long footnote: The humor of the chagles comes at the expense of the profession, but does not open the way to a genuinely new idea about it.

Jacket 14 — Susan M. Schultz — on Charles Bernstein

Artitice concludes his request for money with a sentence that puns between the worlds of art and business: The adequate representation of sensibility, then, comes through ready-made vocabularies. The “frame,” then, is revolutionary, but the meat of the piece is “locked” in place; it is the MLA style that he avers to using, though without knowing why.

And yet, precisely what is lacking from his poem is any reference to image or landscape, what Charles Altieri calls the “scenic style” of much contemporary verse. Bernstein knows that he cannot step outside the styles that are available to him; styles, like voice in his important essay, “Stray Straws and Straw Men” are for him a bernwtein, but not an end. The Face of Fashion. The obvious solution is linked to this obvious bwrnstein to make a poem that means something new, the poet must begin from a concern with style and form.

Meanwhile poets, patiently laboring under a vast cultural misconception, imagine that authenticity is conflatable with subjectivity, not realizing that subjectivity is simply the most acutely engineered of all our technologies – voice-activated, setting in motion a replay of cultural “memories” which are generic and thus belong to nobody.

Aesthetic values became less important for their own sakes and more so for the sake of promotion; as advertising man Ernest Elmo Calkins wrote, “Beauty is introduced into material objects to enhance them in the eyes of the purchaser” U of Chicago P, This is perhaps appropriate, since Bernstein ultimately comes down on the side of style – if not over substance, then as substance.

If Charles Bernstein is successful because he has created a cottage industry in an era of ready-mades, then Charles Bernstein has done something that most graduate students if not all of them cannot do.

The product to be bought, if not consumed, is either the candidate at her MLA job interview, or the successful candidate marketing her dissertation as a book. These values are tied in with leisure time rather than with work. The metaphor that Bernstein employs to link conventional thinking to nineteenth-century industrialization is apt, as is his attempt to inoculate the language against conformity through his own, almost homeopathic, use of “styles.

To me they were good values.

Earlier in the interview he had emphasized the conjunctions of poetry and business: The Meaning of Style. Bernstein seeks “an alternative to the drab conformist fashion-minded thinking that blights our mental landscape full as much as the nineteenth-century mills poxed the English countryside” Poetics Proliferations of style and emphasis on consumer goods led to the conflation, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of democracy with consumer goods; many of us remember images of stunned East Germans wandering through the shops of West Berlin and pointed remarks by television commentators that these East Germans were discovering the benefits of a “free [sic] society.