About the book
Kenneth Goldsmith's argument responds to the flood of text that the internet and digital tools put in front of writers. Rather than adding new texts, he suggests, writers can manage, sort, borrow and rebuild the ones already in circulation, using methods long thought foreign to literature such as word processing, databasing and programming. Goldsmith, who teaches a course of the same name at the University of Pennsylvania, reads writers who work this way, from poems assembled out of Google searches to reused courtroom testimony and possible robo-poetics. He ties them to older practices and figures such as Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol, Walter Benjamin and James Joyce, for whom the idea behind a text mattered as much as the text.
Alina Varlanuta, creator of The Hole in Your Head, read it after finishing an MA in Writing and said it questioned everything, which matched her doubts about creative writing courses.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Alina Varlanuta (Creator/The Hole in Your Head)
I read it after I finished an MA in Writing and it was exactly what I needed to burst my bubble. I loved it because it questioned everything and it perfectly matched my skepticism towards creative writing courses. Regardless of my amazing experience within the creative writing masters, nobody can teach you how to write, but somebody can definitely teach you how to rewrite and how to read. In a world where everybody urges you to be original, creative, Goldsmith states that you can totally be creative with somebody else’s work with a little help from the Internet: word processing, databasing, recycling, sampling, appropriation, coding (‘Pure Poems’ written by Shigeru Matsui in alphanumeric binaries), plundering, programming, and even plagiarizing. Yes, plagiarizing. The most eloquent example (I love it) is this essay entitled ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism’. Jonathan Lethem brilliantly shows us that nothing is original in literature – all ideas has been shared, recycled, stolen, quoted, translated, re-translated, imitated, pirated, patch written, re-written and so on. The essay is the perfect example for this – not a single word or idea belongs Jonathan Lethem. Everything is borrowed from others’ books, ideas, writings. Goldsmith even taught the ‘Uncreative Writing’ course at the University of Pennsylvania where students were not allowed to bring to the class any trace of originality and creativity.
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