Asemic: The Art of Writing

193 Pages·2020·77.631 MB·English

by  Peter Schwenger

ASEMIC
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ASEMIC
T he Art
o¬ Writ ing
l
Peter Schwenger
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
Parts of chapter 2 were originally published as “Enigmatic Epistolarity: Twombly’s Letter of
Resignation,” Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal 50, no. 3 (2017): 73– 89.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schwenger, Peter, author.
Title: Asemic : the art of writing / Peter Schwenger.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006711 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0696-2 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0697-9 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Visualization.
Classification: LCC BF367 .S39 2019 (print) | DDC 153.3/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006711
¬or the art ists
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All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously
such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been
lost, a loss that plays into their content.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
What Asemic Writing Is, and Why 1
CHAPTER 2
Three Asemic Ancestors 19
Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly
CHAPTER 3
Traces 61
CHAPTER 4
Three for Today 101
Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner
CHAPTER 5
Reading Asemic 137
Online Resources for Asemic Writing 151
Acknowledgments 153
Notes 155
Bibliography 161
Index 171