William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage

This new publication, the third in our Contemporary Artist Series, engages work by conceptual artist William Anastasi in relation to literary and artistic predecessors and contemporaries including Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage. This publication is edited by Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté, with contributions by William Anastasi, Joseph Masheck, Thomas McEvilley, and Steve McCaffery, and an introduction by Osvaldo Romberg. In addition, nearly 40 manuscript pages from William Anastasi's manuscripts "me innerman monophone" and "du jarry," engaging Joyce and Duchamp via Jarry, are reproduced in the book, alongside 10 pages of reproductions of Anastasi's work from the 1960s. By showing concretely that many passages in Finnegans Wake contain buried allusions to Jarry's characters and vocabulary and personality, Anastasi is not simply annotating Joyce's masterpiece; he provides a new way of reading all avant-garde literature. If Jarry is shown to be somewhere in Joyce's texts, how can we be sure that he is not everywhere?