Download Lingua Fracta, or, The Livery of Words [PDF]
About the book
What if the entire history of literary criticism had already had a go at Charles Bernstein?
Lingua Fracta, or, The Livery of Words collects seventy-two recovered documents, from Sappho to Stephanie Burt, edited by the indefatigable and increasingly questionable Martin F. Baniskes. Aristotle has to reconsider the Poetics. Pope writes in couplets. Shannon approaches the poetry as a communications problem. Bloom insists on Ashbery as the great predecessor, whether Bernstein wants a father or not.
Each contributor encounters Bernstein in their own time, with their own intellectual equipment. Nobody knows they’re in this book. Some love the poems, some hate them, and some get caught in arguments their theories can’t quite settle. Baniskes supplies the provenance. He has an explanation for everything, which is part of the problem.
I made this with Claude and ChatGPT, through forty-eight manuscript versions and a ridiculous amount of revision. It looks like a small academic press book from 1975 that has circulated through libraries, suffered several lunches, and finally been discarded. Students have underlined passages and argued in the margins. One asks, “or does Bloom just need a father?”
There are diagrams, footnotes, and tomato sauce. The table of contents works.