Figures Acknowledgements Reprint Credits "Plagiarizing Well Is Hard To Do": An Introduction Chapter 1: The Iterative Turn Chapter 2: Erasure Chapter 3: Transcription Chapter 4: Code Bibliography Notes Index
Considering practices of copying, appropriation, and plagiarism, This Is Not a Copy is a timely intervention into how we approach cultural production in the 21st century.
Kaja Marczewska is Lecturer in English and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, London, UK. Her research focuses on experimental arts and writing, print culture and innovative forms of publishing, contemporary aesthetics, and intersections of art, technology and law.
It should be reiterated: this original and creative account of the
'unoriginal genius' behind 'uncreative writing' is not merely
another contribution to the critical literature on conceptual,
code-based, and partially-erased poetry. Rather, This Is Not A Copy
rethinks the very concepts of copying and authorship themselves. We
live now in a world where iteration is the fundamental mode of
engaging culture. Rather than start from problems (whether ethical,
legal, or aesthetic), Marczewska thus starts with a solution. More
than an reckoning of the recent past, this book is a way
forward.
*Craig Dworkin, Professor of English, University of Utah, USA*
Focusing on various forms of iteration (including erasure,
transcription, curation, assemblage, and digital coding) Kaja
Marczewska’s outstanding study should prove to be the gold standard
for teachers and students who are interested in exploring how
contemporary poets and artists have engaged with an avant-garde
tradition of conceptualism to rethink traditional Romantic
(Lockean) ideas of creativity and authorship, and to ask tough
questions about how transformative a text must be (or should need
to be) to avoid copyright infringement. Thorough, informed, soundly
interpreted, and it is hard to imagine a book more up-to-date or
concerning a movement that is more of-the-moment.
*Daniel Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University, USA*
In This Is Not a Copy, Kaja Marczewska demarcates with great
intelligence and careful scholarship the history of an aesthetic
shift, the Iterative Turn that affords us an understanding of an
expanded form of writing demanding an alternative skill set and
including copying as an act of writing in and of itself. Marczewska
breaks down for us three experimental approaches to writing that
dominate the contemporary avant-garde poetic scene: erasure,
transcription and coding. She links these to earlier avant-garde
moments and suggests that the iteration is not just defined at the
level of material reproduction but in terms of repeating existing
artistic procedures as well. Both are made in direct response to a
technologically driven society of postproduction where information
is constantly being selected and reframed to generate new meanings
in order to disrupt the existing order of things. Iterative writing
is presented as a complex system of creative practice and critical
thought. This book is essential for readers with ‘aesthetic
attitude’ who think about the limits of literature and the creative
potential of writing in the digital age.
*Simon Morris, Director of Research in the School of Art,
Architecture and Design, Leeds Beckett University, UK*
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