2022/04/13 by Steven Gould Axelrod · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Poetry Analysis and Criticism #Latin American and Latino Studies #Autobiographical and Biographical Writing
paper · doi:10.1002/9781119669760.ch16
openalex publication_date 2022/04/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The unreadable style, rather than merely frustrating readerly awareness, represents access to fantasy and escape from regulation. Poetry is the genre that best exposes the slippery slopes of language. It makes resistant magic out of the condition of unreadability. Illegibility disturbs the smooth functioning of the reading experience, requiring the bewildered reader to “wander” through the text, much as “wandering, neurasthenic subjects” immerse themselves into “the byways of urban modernity”. This chapter looks at seven poems in a roughly chronological order, ranging from Gertrude Stein to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, using those texts to illustrate seven alternative kinds of unreadability. These are the unreadability of speaking too indirectly ( paronomasia ) and speaking too directly ( concinnity ); saying too little ( laconicism ) and saying too much ( verbigeration ), speaking discontinuously ( seriality ), speaking in a contradictory fashion ( antilogia ), and skipping.