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Total Syntax
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Total Syntax Paperback - 1984

by Barrett Watten

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Reader reviews for Total Syntax

From the publisher

Total Syntax is not "literary criticism" in the habitual, apolitical sense of discovering patterns in writing or deal­ing with author's emotions or overlaying a work's themes onto a preexisting socio­logical grid. Instead, literature is seen not as an institution but as an act, one in which writing of necessity must remold itself at all points--from syntax between words to the kinds of interactive changes that take place between writer and audi­ence and society.

In Watten's view, there is no frame of reference for writing that writing cannot reach, reevaluate, and transform. The meaning of a sentence, a poem, a literary career, or an entire movement is seen as ceaselessly reinventing itself. Total Synta­x is an insistent attempt to place the act of writing in as wide a context as pos­sible. Throughout the book, a wide range of materials is dealt with, not to make a world out of writing, but to address a larger issue: the transformation of the writer's role in the actual world.

Details

  • Title Total Syntax
  • Author Barrett Watten
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First edition
  • Pages 256
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale:
  • Publication date 1984-12
  • Illustrated Yes
  • ISBN 9780809311798 / 0809311798
  • Weight 0.12 lbs (0.05 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.63 in (21.59 x 13.97 x 1.60 cm)
  • Category Literature - Classics / Criticism
  • Library of Congress subjects Literature
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 83020295
  • Dewey Decimal Code 810.900

About the author

Barrett Watten is a Lecturer in the Center for Experimental and Interdisci­plinary Arts, San Francisco State Univer­sity. Among his books are Decay, 1-10, and Complete Thought.