The Comic Trial of Joseph K.:Text and Context
Héctor Ortega, edited by Manuel Flores
ISBN 1-879691-40-X
1996
Paper/ illustrated
US $22.50

Based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this work contains the play script written by Ortega as well as documentation of the original performance, previously unpublished artworks by scenographer JoséLuis Cuevas, a prologue by Augusto Monterroso, critical essays on the subject of humor in Kafka by Héctor Ortega, Hugo Hiriart, Manuel Flores, and D. Emily Hicks, and a general introduction by Harry Polkinhorn.

This book explores the aesthetic and political dimensions of Brazilian print advertisements and how these function to activate desire and maintain the cyles of consumption in late-capitalist society. The mutal interpenetration of both visual and verbal languages and that which they are taken to represent form a seamless web of signs whose driving forces, humor and the erotic, have been effectively harnessed in order to maintain the status quo in post-industrial mass societies.

It is no longer a question of discovering, via Jakobson, that the poetic function is what activates the language of advertising, as in the famous paronomasia "I like Ike," where the sound form reinforces the propagandistic content of the expression. It is now a matter of postulating a perceptual shock provoked by the intrusion, during the creation of the advertisement, of certain cultural series in a state of emergency or risk... Using as her point of departure advertisements published in Brazilian magazines in the eighties, [Cristina Martins] shows how the humor/eroticism relation, inserted in the connections between the verbal and the visual, unleashes, in a non-simplistic and unusual manner, political and aesthetic implications between the advertisement and its cultural context. From the Introduction by Amálio Pinheiro July 1994.
 
 
 

Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism
Gerald Janecek
ISBN 1-879691-41-8
paper, 428 pp.
illustrated
US $25

This is the most comprehensive treatment of a significant episode of the historical avant-garde period to which many refer but with little concrete background. According to Charlotte Douglas (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU), Zaum "is an encyclopedic account of zaum or 'beyonsense,' the most distinctive feature of Russian avant-garde art and poetry early in the 20th century. Janecek has mined a myriad of arcane and inaccessible sources, gathered the entire historical record in one place, and made it readable and comprehensible. His account of zaum theory and practice will be indispensable for anyone interested in modern poetry and art. Certainly it will become a standard text for all students of Russian Futurism."

Gerald Janecek is Professor of Russian at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. His The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 was published by Princeton University Press (1984).
 
 
 

Conjunctions: Verbal-Visual Relations
edited by Laurie Edson.
ISBN 1-879691-45-0
paper, 332 pp.
illustrated
US $20

This volume of original essays by an international group of scholars investigates verbal-visual relations, broadly conceived, in the modern period. The book explores, through a wide varity of theoretical and critical approaches, how thinkers in various fields--aesthetics, poetry, visual art, philosophy, and book illustration--have approached the problematic relationship between the verbal and the visual. Conjunctions honors the work of a pioneering scholar in the field of interarts studies, Renée Riese Hubert. Contributors include Michel Deguy, Judd D. Hubert, Claude Gandelman, Laurie Edson, Marjorie Perloff, Roger Shattuck, Georges Roque, Sydney Lévy, Anne-Marie Christin, Richard Vernier, Breon Mitchell, Steven Winspur, Roger Cardinal, Robert W. Greene, Eric T. Haskell, Harriett Watts, Willard Bohn, and Virginia A. La Charité. The book includes a biography and list of publications of Renée Riese Hubert.

Poetics & Visuality: A Trajectory of Contemporary Brazilian Poetry
Philadelpho Menezes (translated from the Portuguese by Harry Polkinhorn)
1995 Trade paperback: 232 pages
illustrated ISBN 1-879691-29-9
$17.50 plus shipping/handling

Poetics & Visuality offers an account of the development of extreme poetic practices in a country known for its commitment to experimentation. This richly illustrated history begins with spatialism, to which concretism comes as a corrective ordering in the early 1950s. The "visual poetry" of the last decades is cogently theorized as intersign poetry (collage, package, montage poetries), a movement that has drawn international attention.
 
 
 

In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop
Mark Amerika and Lance Olsen, eds.
ISBN 1-879691-32-9
Paper/ pages: 212 /$20 plus shipping/handling

1995

This collection of irreverent, bold, and challenging cutting-edge essays explores the recent cultural phenomenon of "avant-pop." From the editors' "Introduction": "Use the media to subvert the media. Become subversive *mediums*. This Avant-Pop scene still seems very much in development, which I really like. So many people want the regurgitated soundbite in order to go out and repeat the party-line. Well, there may be an Avant-Pop party going on, but there sure ain't no line! Still, though, we seem to have had a blast tracing it's possible lineage and strategies." Originally "published" on the Alt.X World Wide Web publishing site in the spring of 1995, this book now appears as a book. Essays by Brooks Landon, Michael Joyce, Eurudyce, Curtis White, David Blair, Larry McCaffery, Ronald Sukenick, Takayuki Tatsumi, Martin Schecter, Mark Amerika, Lance Olsen, Steven Shaviro, Harry Polkinhorn, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe, and Don Webb.
 
 
 

An ABC of Contemporary Reading
Richard Kostelantez
Paper/ pages: 284 / $20 plus shipping/handling/ illustrated
ISBN 1-879691-26-4
1995

Long regarded among the principal American critics and theorists of the avant-garde in literature and the arts, Kostelanetz presents a contemporary guide to reading vanguard literature. Recalling the purpose of Ezra Pound, Kostelanetz guides the reader to an "acceptance and understanding of radically new art."
 
 
 

The Tyranny of Data
Arthur Getis
Trade hardback/ pages: 52 / $15 plus shipping/handling
ISBN 1-879691-37-X
1995

The Tyranny of Data traces the manifold links between institutional and scholarly practices in the exciting field of contemporary geography. In 1995 Professor Getis was honored by SDSU's Graduate Division and Research as the University's tenth University Research Lecturer. The lecture he delivered was entitled "The Tyranny of Data" and is reproduced here, along with Getis's "Scholarship, Leadership, and Quantitative Methods," which touches on many related subjects. In addition, this volume contains a list of Professor Getis's publications.
 
 
 

Two-Way Street: The Paulista Avenue, Flux and Counter-Flux of Modernity
Marta Bogéa
(translated from the Portuguese by Karen Currie de Carvalho)
1995 Trade paperback: 130 pages
illustrated ISBN 1-879691-27-2
$20 plus shipping/handling

Two-Way Street presents Sao Paulo's Paulista Avenue from "the other side of the street." Bogéa offers a semiotic and genealogical analysis of the richly varied architectural styles of this major world avenue. Urban space is seen as a coded form of communications network, whose fuller meassage emerges upon critical examination.
 
 
 
 

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