Description: Michael J. Shapiro examines how the use of punctuation--conceived not as a series of marks but as a metaphor for the ways in which artistic genres engage with intelligibility--in art opens pathways for thinking through the possibilities for oppositional politics.
Review Quotes: "We tend to think of punctuation--if we think of it at all--as an invisible tool of grammar and writing, a silent orderer with no content or meaning of its own. In Punctuations, Michael Shapiro radically upends that way of thinking. In an exquisitely nuanced and thoughtful reading, Shapiro shows how punctuation--broadly conceived--gives us over to another politics, one that is marked by unresolvedness and contingency rather than determination and order. In this book, voids, interruptions, and other mechanisms of intratextual resistance demand and receive our full attention with critical implications not only for the habits of reading but of how we live in and occupy the world around us."--James R. Martel, author of "The Misinterpellated Subject"