Poetics of the Common Knowledge

Don Byrd is Professor of English at State University of New York at Albany. He has also written Charles Olson's Maximus; Aesop's Garden; and The Great Dime Store Centennial.

"Don Byrd's book presents postmodernism as a continuation of the metaphysical skeptical tradition, reaching its dead end with deconstruction. Byrd's alternative in literary studies is a return to poetry as a revitalization of language. The book is very learned, and written with verve and vigor." — Mihai I. Spariosu, The University of Georgia"This is an important, provocative book. At a time when poetics—especially that of the difficult sort dealt with here—has been increasingly pushed to the margins of academic discourse, Don Byrd has come forward with a tour de force that both argues and enacts the bearing of poetic knowledge upon the issues and debates tending to displace it. He not only offers astute, illuminating readings of work by Stein, Zukofsky, Duncan, Olson, and others, but goes to great lengths to map the ground—intellectual, historical, technological, phenomenological—that makes these works matter. Such ground makes his own undertaking on behalf of poetic knowledge purposeful and necessary, and his mapping of it is not only informed, sophisticated and intellectually stunning but passionate and compelling as well." — Nathaniel Mackey, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Acknowledgments1. A Parable of Beginning Making the Working Space The Fix Radical Modernism Poetic Knowledge An Orientation The Constitution of Life as a Symbolic Machine: Some Sub/Versions 2. Symbolic Nature The Two CulturesThe Pursuit of the Infinite Ideal Language The Second House of Culture The Unacknowledged HouseThe Two Languages: Space Compendious Abbreviations Intuition The EquivocationsThe Two Languages: TimeThe Cyborg Poetry and the Cartesian Circle Confidence beyond Thought What Is Real TimeLinguistics: CartesianLinguistics: Non-Cartesian Measure 3. Symbolic History The Hegelian Apocalypse The Two Modernisms The End of Poetry, the Beginning of Poetry "Betwixt Unity and Number" Verkehrte Welt Force and Understanding The Final Triumph of Humanism The Tedium of the Absolute he End of History Whitman and the Wrong Infinity Language of Eros Fechner's Experiment The Continuous and the Discrete The Two Modernisms Again How to Read and Write4. Symbolic Person The Category of the Person MetapsychologyPsychodynamism Psychotopography and the Contact Barrier Psychoeconomy and Symbolic TransferThe Performance of Person: Louis ZukofskyThe Contingent Person Jargon and the Displacement of the Symbolic Person5. Symbolic Symbols Society Formal Systems Statistical RealityThe Aesthetics of Recursion The Meaning of Recursion The Ethics of Recursion The Modernism that Does Not Become Dated Three Versions of Statistical Reality The Supreme Fiction: The Algebraic Metaphor and Common Language The Comedian as the Letter G: The Lattice of Linked Objects Cognitive Science: Topological ContinuityRecurrence Connectionism Statistics and the Single Occasion Nonstatistical Reality Logography: Non-Statistical Writing Construction6. Beginning Again What Was Right in Metaphysics What Should Have Come First Index