Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

English

What is a work that arrives before it is written? What is a work that emerges from the soft tissue of the body at different points in a given era? How do make a new kind of writing derived from the oscillation between two rectangles of light; frames that might include surveillance, animal ethologies and anatomies, as much as a philosophy of the book-to-be? This extraordinary anthology constellates readings of Tomasula novels and intermedia projects that offer us a glimpse of the novel as installation, as 'nature opening out to culture.' As someone interested in what happens at the intersection of narrative and biology, the instance of mutation as a trait transmitted between and across texts of different kinds, I was very inspired by the essays in this remarkable collection. David Banash has curated something that makes it possible to come to writing again, differently. The introduction, co-written with Andrea Spain, was, itself, a fierce and brilliant consideration of 'composition, emergence, sensation': the intense, unpredictable and sometimes violent energies that underlie Tomasula’s work in its incipient stages, but also carry it through a duration. Which is prose. Which is this other kind of radical art. An art or novel that appears only when we orient towards it. In this way.