Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How do artworks 'speak', and how do we 'listen'
and respond? These questions underlie the
investigation here of Roni Horn's Pair Object
III: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson's later
manuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages
Paysages, Fiona Templeton's Cells of Release and
Jenny Holzer's Lustmord. The tenets of critical
performance, art-writing and site-writing
inform the critical method used in Poetics
and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of
these five artworks, and is arranged in order
to fulfil three main objectives: to understand
how the artworks generate meaning through a
material poetics in relation to place; to develop
a critical methodology for engaging with them;
and to investigate their ethical potential and
political imperative. All of this, ultimately,
facilitates the development of a triadic relation
between theoretical concepts of sign, subject
and site at the crossover between poetry,
art and spatial practices. This extends each
artwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounter
in order to offer - and allow others to grasp
- an appreciation of how the artwork figures
meaningfully, as well as configures meaning,
in the wider world of objects and things. The
book concludes with a discussion of the ethics
of reading from the second person, opening up
a debate concerning the role of empathy within
contemporary, politically engaged practices in
art and poetry.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. vii)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiii)
• Introduction: Situating Poetics and Place: Context, Method and Theoretical Foundation (p. 1)
• 1 Object, Sign and Punctuating Space: Tracing an Emergence of the Indexical Symbol through Roni Horn's Pair Object III: For Two Rooms (p. 39)
• 2 The Page as Site: A Creative and Critical Performance of Emily Dickinson's Later Manuscripts (p. 64)
• 3 Projecting the Voice: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages Paysages and the Ethics of Aesthetic Relation (p. 102)
• 4 Performing the Line: Fiona Templeton's Cells of Release as Poetical/Political Activism (p. 130)
• 5 The Material Reach of the Word: Jenny Holzer's Lustmord and the Responsibility of Art (p. 164)
• Conclusion: Leaving Poetics and Place: Opening Questions onto the Material and Spatial Potential of Empathic Process (p. 193)
• Notes (p. 199)
• Bibliography (p. 215)
• Index (p. 229)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Kristen Kreider is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.