’Pataphysics Unrolled

Katie L. Price is Senior Associate Director at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College, codirector of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, and Interviews Editor at Jacket2. She is the author of the chapbook BRCA: Birth of a Patient. Michael R. Taylor is Artistic Director and Chief Curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is the author of Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, and Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Editors’ Note



Introduction: “Unrolled by the Saliva and Teeth of the Water”

Katie L. Price



Part 1: “And Behold, the Wallpaper of Faustroll’s Body”: Jarry’s Pataphysical Invitation

1. Twisted Witz: Experiments in Psychopathology and Humor by Dr. Faustroll and His Pataphysical Progeny

John Heon

2. Pataphallics in Jarry’s Novels

Jean-Michel Rabaté

3. Wartime Pataphysics: Postwar Surrealism, the Main à Plume Group, and Boris Rybak’s Intraphysics

Catherine Hanson

4. Marcel Duchamp and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique

Marc Décimo

Translated by Anne M. Mulhall

5. The Potential Energy of Texts [ΔU = −PΔV]

Craig Dworkin



Part 2: “Like a Musical Score, All Art and All Science”: Pataphysics After Jarry and Beyond the Collège

6. Pataphysics in Philadelphia: The Strange Case of James E. Brewton

Michael R. Taylor

7. Circumstantial Evidence: Pataphysical Inflexions in Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger and bpNichol’s Probable Systems

Steve McCaffery

8. Beyond “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”: Pataphysics and Popular Music

Marcus O’Dair

9. Art and the Pataphysics of Exception: Or, How a Sieve Becomes a Time Machine

Ted Hiebert



Part 3: “Written in the Curves of the Limbs”: Pataphysical Criticism

10. Reading, Writing, and Rhythmatic

Jerome McGann

11. The Patacritical Demon, Two Decades Later

Johanna Drucker

12. Reflections on Applied Research in Patacriticism: Prism and Reading’s Shape

Brandon Walsh

13. The Pataquerical Imagination: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies

Charles Bernstein



Part 4: “Progression to an Infinite Degree Was Prophesized Therein”: Pataphysics’ Possible Futures

14. Concerning an Unfindable Architecture

Seth McDowell

15. Metabolic Poetics: Writing the Anthropocene

Adam Dickinson

16. Pataphysics and Computing

Andrew Hugill and James Hendler

17. Pataphysics and the Academy

Orchid Tierney



Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index