“Hacked beauty”: A readerly rewriting of a text as a communicative strategy in regional avant-garde discourse

Abstract

The paper focuses on a poetic discourse of the avant-garde poetic community “41º” (A. Kruchenykh, I. Terentyev, I. Zdanevich). Unlike the public actions of “classic” avant-garde (futuristic) communities, “41º” relied less on scandal as a means to attract the attention of the “newshawk”, a relay of a public action for a broader audience. Regional journalists, literary critics sympathized with the futurists and included them into their creative community. Their attention did not have to be attracted on purpose. Scandal has been replaced by cooperation. Therefore, the communicative strategy that has developed in the “41º” community is predicated on a dialogue, it implies the activity of the reader. It as a consequence, the reader parodies the poet-orator. The reader deliberately alters and then creatively twists the poet’s statement, appropriating the device and becoming the author himself, a subject expressing feelings. This strategy becomes topical in A. Kruchenykh and I. Terentyev poetic theory as part of the “readerly” program. A quest “mistakes” (textual zones subject to a parodic recoding) in someone else’s text is foregrounded. A “mistake” (“shift”) makes it possible to reimagine the text as a semiotic object and reassign its reference to a readerly intention not coinciding with the authorial one, so that the reader as a co-performer becomes a co-author. The purpose of text misreading (“hacking”) is to shift the focus from the “I” of the writing subject and from the printed statement to the context as a source of creativity and to the performer’s gesture as the referent of the statement.