’Pataphysics Unrolled by Katie L. Price, Paperback, 9780271089591 | Buy online at The Nile
Departments
 Free Returns*

’Pataphysics Unrolled

Author: Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor   Series: Refiguring Modernism

Paperback

A collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.

Read more
New
$108.70
Or pay later with
Check delivery options
Paperback

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

A collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.

Read more

Description

In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist “science of imaginary solutions,” a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry “made the gesture of dying,” Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously.

’Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the Collège de ’Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Décimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O’Dair, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.

Read more

Critic Reviews

’Pataphysics Unrolled looks to be a pataphysically invaluable tome that is an illustration of . . . precisely such pataphysical endeavours as itself, pataphysically.”

—Brian Reffin Smith Leonardo Reviews


“Continuing and elaborating Alfred Jarry’s notion of ’pataphysics, this collection tracks ’pataphysics’ continued appearances and developments in ensuing avant-garde movements, modern and contemporary art, the intersections of art, literature, and science— and the far-reaching effects of pushing against normative logics and thinking in exceptional ways.”

—Judith Roof, author of What Gender Is, What Gender Does

Read more

About the Author

Katie L. Price is Senior Associate Director at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College, codirector of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, and Interviews Editor at Jacket2. She is the author of the chapbook BRCA: Birth of a Patient.

Michael R. Taylor is Artistic Director and Chief Curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is the author of Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, and Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics.

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Pennsylvania State University Press
Published
22nd October 2024
Pages
344
ISBN
9780271089591

Returns

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.

New
$108.70
Or pay later with
Check delivery options