Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography

The introduction summarizes the scope of the project and its methodologies, arguing for a critically descriptive reading practice. Looking at artists’ books, conceptual writing projects, and texts by writers as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Solmaz Sharif, and Angelo V. Suárez, the chapter first sketches the range of works that engage the dictionary in ways other than those investigated in subsequent chapters. In contrast to writers who have turned to the dictionary as an idealized abstraction, or a source of suppressed cultural biases, the chapter then proposes a dictionary poetics extrapolated from the particular form of reference books and the typography of particular editions, with their emphasis on the chain of the signifier, the chance proximities of otherwise unrelated words, and recursive structures of motivated paths and self-referential loops. Discussing poems by Emily Dickinson, Cecil Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Jack Kerouac, and Stéphane Mallarmé the chapter outlines the principles of a radical lexicography in which the inherent logic of the dictionary serves as a generative, structuring device (and not merely an authoritative compendium).