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No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.
Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.”
An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
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Subjects
Publishers and publishing, Electronic publishing, Self-publishing, Authorship, Pamphlets, Periodicals, publishing, Digital media, Politics and literature, Mass media, Publishers and publishing--political aspects, Electronic publishing--political aspects, Self-publishing--political aspects, Authorship--political aspects, Pamphlets--publishing, Communist literature--publishing, Periodicals--publishing, Alternative mass media, Literary criticism--books & reading, Literary criticism--semiotics & theory, Social science--media studies, Z278 .t48 2016, 070.5, Lit007000 lit006000 soc052000Showing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
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1
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing
2017, University of Minnesota Press
in English
0816699992 9780816699995
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2
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing
2017, University of Minnesota Press
in English
0816621969 9780816621965
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3
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing
2016, University of Minnesota Press
in English
1452951993 9781452951997
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4
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing
2016, University of Minnesota Press
in English
1452951985 9781452951980
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