Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
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Marjorie Perloff
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Abstract: This essay, following upon Kyoo Lee's case for "counterreading", argues for what I call "micropoetics": a close reading that takes into account every phoneme, morpheme, and word of a poetic text and reads that text "verbivocovisually", to use James Joyce's term. I take as my model Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin — the smallest possible distinction, whether temporal or spatial, between A and B. Similarity and analogy, I argue, have been overstressed and produced the problematic political discourse of the present with its clichés and vapid generalizations. Infrathin reading, on the other hand, establishes difference and the uniqueness of a given text, as I show in the case of Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene", where the seeming repetition of phrasing is actually a form of elaborate word play.
Key words: micropoetics, Infrathin, repetition, difference, Duchamp, Stein, De Campos, Baudelaire, counterreading, cliché
Marjorie Perloff. Microreading/Microwriting[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art.
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URL: https://tsla.ecnu.edu.cn/EN/
https://tsla.ecnu.edu.cn/EN/Y2019/V39/I3/169