Unlike period style, which has a specific meaning in art history going back to Winckelmann, the term critical art practice has a contemporary but less defined usage, among left art educators for one (see its current Wikipedia stub). It appears in Questions of Poetics primarily in the introduction, and with a larger range of inference. Even so, the distinction between period style and critical art practice is crucial: the former is a set of static attributes, associated with fixed aesthetic or literary periodization, and the latter the real-time engagement with fundamental assumptions of language, style, form, genre, medium, person, identity, discourse, reception, history, and so on: … More

An online commentator, I have heard, has just described my critical work Questions of Poetics as imperialist and hegemonic—strong language indeed! While my book does make strong claims, they are in the context of critiquing, and revising, the history of Language writing after 2000, among many topics. One of its major polemical goals is to defend Language writing from the charge of being a “period style”—a term first used by Marjorie Perloff and taken up by others to dismiss Language writing’s continuing relevance. I argue that Language writing has been widely influential, among many tendencies; it is a part of the literary history and poetic resources of the present. That does not make it the Third Rome, no.  … More