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list price: $17.95
edition:Paperback
category: Literary Criticism
published: Jan 1999
ISBN:9780889224230
publisher: Talonbooks

ABC of Reading TRG

by Peter Jaeger, edited by Frank Davey

tagged: canadian
Description

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal concerns, and by reading their reports in conjunction with their individually authored writings.
On the one hand, it reads TRG’s reports “against the grain”: it attempts to uncover the unconscious links among repressed affective and political elements that circulate throughout their writing. This approach predominantly entails situating TRG in the shadow of perspectives developed by Lacan, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. On the other hand, it also reads the TRG reports sympathetically, by underlining their construction of a positive, productive desire which does not centre on lack, but which actively celebrates multiplicity and affirmation, an approach that chiefly reads the group in the light of theories proposed by Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Julia Kristeva. Readers can operate this book either by reading it conventionally from beginning to end, or by following chains of thought, indicated by superscript letters which link non-sequential chapters together-a device borrowed from Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology. The rhetorical artifice of the alphabetical framework affords a means to preserve one of the TRG’s most significant contributions to research writing on contemporary poetics, i.e., their simultaneous stress on both form and critical investigation.
In the end, ABC of Reading TRG discusses not so much what the Toronto Research Group’s reports are about, but what they invite us to think about.

About the Authors
Peter Jaeger, author of ABC of Reading TRG, is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at State University of New York, Buffalo, where he is writing on conceptual poetics. His work includes the poetry collection Power Lawn (Coach House Books, 1999), as well as the chapbook Bibliodoppler (Writer’s Forum, 1998) and the artist’s workbook stretch conflates (Tailspin, 1997). He lives in Toronto.

Frank Davey has been a poet, editor, small-magazine publisher, literary critic, and cultural critic in Canada since 1961. He is editor and co-founder of the influential poetry newsletter Tish (1961-63) and since 1965 editor of Open Letter, the Canadian journal of writing and theory. With Fred Wah in 1984, he founded SwiftCurrent, the world’s first online literary magazine, and operated it until 1990. His more than forty books include Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (1980), The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986), Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Canadian Literary Power (1994), and Back to the War (2005).

Contributor Notes

Peter Jaeger
Peter Jaeger, author of ABC of Reading TRG has taught writing and theory at Dartington College of Arts, University of Toronto and Royal Holloway, University of London. He currently teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University.
His publications include Eckhart Cars (Salt Publishing, 2004), Power Lawn (Coach House Books, 1999), ABC of Reading TRG (Talonbooks, 1999), and Eckhart Cars (Salt Publishing, 2004), as well as the chapbook Bibliodoppler (Writer’s Forum, 1998) and the artist’s workbook stretch conflates (Tailspin, 1997).
Peter Jaeger was born in Montreal, Canada.

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