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To destroy language

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360410001693885

1470-1308

Craig Dworkin,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

'To destroy language' documents the most radical linguistic experiments of Russian Futurism, with particular attention to Aleksei Kruchenykh's zaum' (transrational) poems. His writing provides a background against which to read similarly extreme experiments in American poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the essay argues that such works are ultimately about the fundamental potentials and prelimits of a poem to 'be about': simultaneously challenging their readers to question the very models by which we understand the operations of language, as well as demonstrating the degree to which even the most radically fractured language can in fact be read.