A review of Annette Gilbert’s ‘Literature’s Elsewheres’
In the presence of absence
Whether you call it poetry, experimental — non-retinal — appropriation — propositional — or site-specific literature, conceptual writing, a constellation of literary practices, an “instantiated entity,” an otherness, or an elsewhere . . . the literary works presented in Gilbert’s book “reflect upon and performatively test the actual, literal conditions of their existence.”
Literature’s Elsewheres
Annette Gilbert
The MIT Press 2022, 432 pages, $34.95, ISBN 9780262543415
language becomes an infinite museum, whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.
—Robert Smithson, 1968[1]