Limits of Fabrication

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics.

"The Limits of Fabrication brings an essential argument to discussions concerning the end of art. Where Hegel affirms that poetry accomplishes the dematerialization of aesthetic expression by reducing it to linguistic transparency, Brown on the contrary demonstrates that a poem is always a factory, where meaning is fashioned, even if invisibly, through the crystals, quanta, or nanotubes of language. No metaphorical abstraction in this, but the revelation of the elementary technology at work in words. A strikingly singular, beautiful, and important book." -- -Catherine Malabou author of The New Wounded "Poems are material things. From that simple observation, Nathan Brown teases out startling sequellae: experimental poetry is materials research, and materials science - in its concern with form and organization - is a branch of poetics. In the language of materials science, Brown's synthesis - of poetry, philosophy, and nanotechnology - is imaginative, while his characterizations are rigorous and enlightening." -- -Cyrus Mody Rice University "In this ambitious and exciting book, Nathan Brown aligns two practices that occur at the limits of fabrication: one, at play in scenes of reading and writing, involves the poet's ability to structure language mark by mark; the other, at play in materials research and manufacture, involves the nanoscientist's ability to manipulate matter atom by atom. These forms of making open an understanding of the methods, techniques, and procedures that structure the world we now inhabit. Unfolding across five carefully sequenced chapters, the book concludes with a brilliant reading of Mad Science in Imperial City, a volume of poems by the engineer and poet who provides Brown's epigraph and sets the scale for his important expansion of materialist poetics. 'Work nano,' Shanxing Wang urges, 'think cosmologic.' The Limits of Fabrication shows us how such a feat might be accomplished." -- -Adalaide Morris The University of Iowa

• List of Figures Prologue: The Limits Of Fabrication Introduction: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics 1. The Inorganic Open: Nanotechnology And and Physical Being 2. Objectism: Charles Olson's Poetics Of of Physical Being 3. Design Science: Geodesic Architecture In in Nanoscale Carbon Chemistry And and Ronald Johnson's Ark 4. Surrational Solids, Surrealist Liquids: Crystallography And and Biotechnology In in Materials Science And and Materialist Poetry 5. The Scale Of of A a Wound: Nanotechnology And and The the Poetics Of of Real Abstraction In in Shanxing Wang's Mad Science In in Imperial City Conclusion: Techne, Poiesis, Fabrication Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index