Punctuation

"In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody productively bridges both performance criticism and literary analysis through a consideration of punctuation. To be certain, this is a bold and innovative move that compels us to consider what is too often taken for granted: how punctuation performs. Brody's book is decidedly interdisciplinary, as she analyzes a diverse array of performance texts always mindful of the intersections of art, politics, and play. As a result, Brody brings important insight to issues of race, gender, and performance through this examination of punctuation. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a most ambitious and significant work that will certainly have a cross-disciplinary impact."--Harry J. Elam Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University "Here is a book that earns the right to the spaces between its sumptuously smart words. Here is a book that pays attention to the 'minor' detail of punctuation in ways that percolate with questions pertaining to history, subject formation, ethnicity, racialization, technology, authorship, physiology, philosophy, aesthetic value, the social, the political, and more (to pile up the commas). Lacing her arguments with humor as well as insight, Jennifer DeVere Brody here tracks punctuation's contradictory performances across a number of times and places. She offers close readings of artists and authors who deploy punctuation pointedly in a variety of mediums, amplifying the mark of the mark, the score of the score, the thrust or lean of the emphaticals that prop our points. Here is a book that doubles as a stage upon which the understudied finally gets to strut and fret with an embodied wit, critical grace, and socially relevant verve."--Rebecca Schneider, Brown University This is the book that puts the "pun", not to mention the "punk", in "punctuation"...a book of spirited cultural criticism, not a monograph on linguistics. - Raphael Salkie, professor of language studies, University of Brighton