'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Tracing the place of 'pataphysics in the relationship between science and poetry, Christian Bök shows it is fundamental to the nature of the postmodern, and considers the work of Alfred Jarry and its influence on others.A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of Imaginary Science raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, the ways we think about, write, and read it, and the sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.

Literature & Fiction

Bök, Christian

History & Criticism

Northwestern University Press

'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Tracing the place of 'pataphysics in the relationship between science and poetry, Christian Bök shows it is fundamental to the nature of the postmodern, and considers the work of Alfred Jarry and its influence on others. A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of Imaginary Science raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, the ways we think about, write, and read it, and the sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.

Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee

Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada's best fiction. Sometime between the 1960s and 1980s Canadian society began unbuttoning itself, and our experimental writers helped loosen the threads. This anthology exhibits the first deep breaths. From Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to John Riddell's Pope Leo El Elope (a tale that recounts a papal assassination, using only the letters E, L, O, and P) to the most radical écriture féminine of Audrey Thomas and Gail Scott, Ground Works displays Canadian writing as it's never been seen before. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood's. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bök to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.

Literary

House of Anansi Press

Crystallography: Book 1 of Information Theory (Information Theory, Book 1)

Science & Math

Chemistry

Coach House Pr

'Eunoia' which means 'beautiful thinking' is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: the courtly A, the elegiac E, the lyrical I, the jocular O, and the obscene U. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this uncanny work of avant-garde literature promises to be one of the most important books of the decade.

Eunoia

Contemporary

Coach House Books

Published in 1994, Crystallography was a gem of a book, an instant hit that was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.
'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.
Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.

Crystallography

Poetry

Now you can invite that jazzman into the comfort of your own home! Reading Eunoia to yourself was fun, sure, but now you can hear it as it was meant to be read – by the author himself! Listen as he wraps his mouth around page after page of the most convoluted tongue twister you've ever heard! You can even follow along in your copy of Eunoia as he trips the vowels fantastic!
Recorded in the studio by Torpor Vigilante and Coach House author Steve Venright, this CD features Bök reading Eunoia in its entirety – in his uniquely energetic, well enunciated dadaist style. This CD is a must for anyone interested in the way Eunoia tangos with the English language.

Eunoia: The CD

Dramas & Plays

The word eunoia,’ which literally means beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!).
Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008.
This edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword.

Eunoia: The Upgraded Edition

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian
Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization.
Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term.
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

The Xenotext: Book 1

"The dense hermeticism in Eyre's vision generates a fascinating journey for the viewer, rewarded with a glimpse into a very complex psyche. A magnificent body of work." —Canadian Art
Known for the theatricality of her self-portraits and the doubles that populate her images, disrupting the fixity of identity, Janieta Eyre is one of Canada's most original, provocative, and internationally recognized photographers. Spanning her seven major series (1993–2013), Incarnations is the first collection to make accessible a representative body of her work, including contributions by prominent Canadian writers and artists.

Incarnations: The Photography of Janieta Eyre

Arts & Photography

Crosbie, Lynn

Eyre, Janieta

Dorenbaum, David

Photography & Video

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bök, Christian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bök, Christian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bök, Christian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee

Crystallography: Book 1 of Information Theory (Information Theory, Book 1)

Eunoia

Crystallography

Eunoia: The CD

Eunoia: The Upgraded Edition

The Xenotext: Book 1

Incarnations: The Photography of Janieta Eyre