Mêmewars

Eugenia Sojka is a sessional instructor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

Adeena Karasick joins a group of such leading “language-focused
writers” as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Daphne Marlatt, and Erin Mouré, who
place their attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning,
and take for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, syntax, nor subject
matter. Karasick, however, seems to go further in her experimentation
with language, which is for her the source of experience, perception,
and thought itself. Her writing is an extraordinary tour de force in the
new paraliterary initiative of “fiction/theory” that blends various
genres and revels in their “contamination.” It is also an
interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation of various
discourses (poetic, critical, autobiographical, feminist, and
historical, with a special emphasis on the history of Jews and the
Holocaust) and languages (English, French, German, Hebrew), including
the intersemiotic transcoding between the body and writing. Karasick
questions discourses of mastery and challenges monological concepts of
stable identity.

In the tradition of the historical avant-garde
(Cubism/Dadaism/Surrealism), concrete poetry, or lettrism, Karasick
foregrounds the material side of language (sound, rhythm, syntax); her
words and sentences continually drift between materiality and
transparency. Her texts are collages of words, phonemes, letters, and
various discourses. She is concerned with visual form (from cubelike
stanzas to a radical arrangement of the printed page) and the
deconstruction of the traditional form of a book (she questions
beginnings and ends). Various typefaces, unusual line and word spacing,
and unexpected irregular-

ities in punctuation and capitalization point to a Cubist-inspired
experimentation. Nevertheless, it is Derridean grammatological discourse
that Karasick explores thoroughly and engages in its feminization. Her
verbo-visual writing, which joins together “in one graphic code
figurative, symbolic, abstract and phonetic elements” (Ulmer), allows
her to create such fascinating collage “structures” as
“S’ECRE(A)TURE,” “N’ERRATION,” or “Chora’r(elations).”

Karasick seems to take a calculated risk in publishing this text, as
her highly experimental writing may be spurned by readers who are not
familiar with current complex theoretical and linguistic discourses.
Nevertheless, the writing is certainly a feast for readers who
appreciate “the dance of the intellect.”