Conceptual writing  

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Conceptual writing (often used interchangeably with conceptual poetry) is a style of writing which relies on processes and experiments. This can include texts which may be reduced to a set of procedures, a generative instruction or constraint, or a "concept" which precedes and is considered more important than the resulting text(s). As a category, it is closely related to conceptual art.

Kenneth Goldsmith considers the "paradigmatic work" of the "unoriginal genius" Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

Works classified as conceptual writings

Historical examples

• Denis Diderot: Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796) – direct appropriation of segments of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
• Stéphane Mallarmé: Le livre (1893-1898, unfinished) – generative procedures of a modular book whose actual content, besides poetic fragments, is not mentioned at all in the draft manuscripts
• Marcel Duchamp: Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 (published in 1937) – four typewritten fragments from inexistent whole text(s); Man Before the Mirror (published in 1934) – literary ready-made, a text supposedly written by a German friend of Man Ray, translated into English and signed by Rrose Sélavy
• Louis Aragon: Suicide (1920) – transcription of the alphabet, ordered in five lines (a continuous version was published by Aram Saroyan under the title STEAK, in the 1968 volume Aram Saroyan)
• Tristan Tzara: Pour faire un poème dadaïste, from Dada manifeste sur l'arnour faible et l'amour amer (1920) – instructions for the creation of a Dadaist collage poem, followed by an example
• Blaise Cendrars: Kodak (Documentaire) (1924) – 20 poems appropriating phrases from Gustave Le Rouge's Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius
• C.K. Ogden: Anna Livia Plurabelle (1931) – homolinguistic translation, in Basic English, of a fragment from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
• William Butler Yeats: Mona Lisa (1936) – a transcription of a passage of Walter H. Pater's Studies in the History of Renaissance into Poundian free verse
• Wiener Gruppe (Bayer / Rühm / Wiener): Akustisches Cabaret (1959) – list of "ideas" for an "acoustic cabaret"
• Brion Gysin: Minutes to Go (1960) – cut-ups (technique also applied by William S. Burroughs)
• Raymond Queneau: Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) – sonnets whose lines which may be recombined to obtain 100,000,000,000,000 sonnets (see Oulipo constraint-based writing); Les fondements de la littérature (1976) – appropriation of David Hilbert's Foundations of Mathematics with replaced words
• Clark Coolidge: Bond Sonnets (1965) – collage sonnets using words from Ian Fleming’s 1961 novel Thunderball (which plagiarized the same-titled collaborative screenplay) selected with a random number generator
• Ted Berrigan: A Conversation with John Cage (1966) – a fake interview misattributing to John Cage quotes by Fernando Arabel, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and others.
• Dan Graham: Exclusion Principle and Poem-Schema (1966)
• Joseph Kosuth: Purloined: A Novel (1966-2000) – collage of single pages photocopied from over 100 different novels (the only addition is changed page numbering)
• Pedro Xisto: Vogaláxia (1966) – transcription of every possible 5-letter combination of the 5 vowels
• León Ferrari: Palabras Ajenas (1967) – a collection of quotes from diverse sources
• David Antin: Novel Poem (1968) – poem composed of phrases copied from contemporary popular novels
• Andy Warhol: A, A Novel (1968) – transcription (by different typists, not by Warhol himself) of recordings done by Warhol following Ondine with a tape recorder (similar concepts have later been enacted by Ed Friedman in The Telephone Book and by Kenneth Goldsmith in Soliloquy)
• Vito Acconci: Transference (1969) – transcription of the single letters lining the margins of pages from various pages in Roget’s Thesaurus (also see other works gathered in the 2006 edition Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci)
• Peter Handke: Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968 (1969) - poem consisting of the players' from the 1. FC Nürnberg names as printed in sports magazines
• J. G. Ballard: Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty (1970), Princess Margaret’s Facelift (1970), Queen Elizabeth's Rhinoplasty (1976) – appropriation of medical case studies, in which anonymous subjects ("patient X") were replaced with the names of the celebrity in each title
• Gerald Ferguson: The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length (1970) – dictionary of English words sorted by word length
• Michael Harvey: White Papers (1971)
• Ulises Carrión: tatatá (1972)
• Bernard Heidsieck: Vaduz (1974)
• Charles Bernstein: My/My/My (published in Asylums, 1975) – list of objects beginning with the first-person possessive; I and The (published in The Sophist, 1979) – 1,350 words compiled from Word Frequencies in Spoken American English by Hatvig Dahl
• Georges Perec: Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (1975) – description of all the things observed by Perec in Place Saint-Sulpice during three days, at different times of the day
• Bernadette Mayer: Eruditio ex Memoria (1977) – novel composed of "notes from Catholic school classes, letters from school officials, quotations, definitions, commonplaces" (also read List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments)
• Charles Reznikoff: Testimony (1978) – transcription and editing of various court documents (similar concept enacted by Vanessa Place in Statement of Facts)
• Christopher Knowles: Typings (1979) – transcriptions of radio broadcasts
• Kathy Acker: Great Expectations: A Novel (1983) – passages from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden are plagiarized and rewritten in the opening of the book
• John Cage: X (1983) – collection of mesostics and examples of writing through
• José Luis Ayala Olazaval: Canto Sideral (1984) – combinatory book
• Sergio Pesutic: La hinteligencia militar (1986) – blank book
• Michael Klauke: Ad Infinitum (1988)
• Claude Closky: Les 1000 premiers nombres classés par ordre alphabétique (1989) – self-explanatory title (the first 1000 numbers classified in alphabetical order); Mon Catalogue (1999) – catalogue of ads (on products the author claims to own) in which the second-person pronouns have been changed to first-person pronouns

See also

• Appropriation (art)
• Conceptual art
• Concrete poetry
• Cut-up technique
• Dada
• Deconstruction
• Fluxus
• Found poetry
• Language poets
• Post-structuralism
• Sound poetry