Description:
A collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.
Brief description: Katie L. Price is Senior Associate Director at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College, codirector of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, and Interviews Editor at Jacket2. She is the author of the chapbook BRCA: Birth of a Patient.
Review Quotes:
"Continuing and elaborating Alfred Jarry's notion of 'pataphysics, this collection tracks 'pataphysics' continued appearances and developments in ensuing avant-garde movements, modern and contemporary art, the intersections of art, literature, and science-- and the far-reaching effects of pushing against normative logics and thinking in exceptional ways."
--Judith Roof, author of What Gender Is, What Gender Does