 Design
and Debris: A Chaotics of
Postmodern American Fiction.
Tuscaloosa and London: University
of Alabama Press,
2002, xi, 272 pp. Awarded the 2000 Elizabeth Agee
Prize for Best Manuscript in American Literary Studies by the University of Alabama
Press.
Design & Debris discusses the relationship between order
and disorder in the works of Kathy Acker, John Barth, Robert Coover, Don
DeLillo, John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, Thomas Pynchon, and Gilbert
Sorrentino. Conte's approach to their work has been through the scientific
discipline of chaos theory. He distinguishes between those novels in
which narrative structure locates order hidden in disorder (works whose
authors he calls "proceduralists") and those in which structure
reflects the opposite--disorder emerging from states of order (works whose
authors he calls "disruptors").
Conte demonstrates how the paradigm shift from
modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world,
to postmodernism, in which artists portray the process of "orderly
disorder," has led postmodern artists to embrace science in their
treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates
disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and the cognitive
sciences, Conte suggests a second paradigm shift--from modernist specialization
to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is
freed from the purely literary and engages in a greater degree of
interactivity--between literature and science and between author and
reader. Contemporary literature, then, is a literature of flux and
flexibility.
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 Unending Design: The Forms
of Postmodern Poetry.
Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991, xii, 314 pp. Nominated
for the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award,
1993.
Drawing on the work of a wide range of
contemporary American poets from Ashbery to Zukofsky, Joseph M. Conte
elaborates an innovative typology of postmodern poetic forms. In
Conte's view, looking at recent poetry in terms of the complementary
methods of seriality and proceduralism offers a rewarding alternative to
the familiar analytic dichotomy of "open" and "closed"
forms.
Unending Design examines general
issues of contemporary poetics--how to categorize versions of the
postmodern "long" poem, or to address the multiple voices of the
lyric, for example--as well as the smallest details of poetic
structure. Conte reads closely the works of such canonical figures
as Creeley, Ashbery, and Duncan, semi-canonical writers such as Jack
Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, and Lorine Niedecker, and previously overlooked
poets including Harry Mathews, Paul Blackburn, William Bronk, and Weldon
Kees. He describes the serial form adopted by Creeley, George Oppen,
and Jack Spicer, among others, as combinative and provisional,
incorporating random events without succumbing to formlessness. Then
he discusses the procedural form--developed by poets including Ashbery and
Mathews, and the composer John Cage--in which arbitrary constraints
generate the content, rather than merely contain it. Among the
characteristics of proceduralism are the varation of recurrent lexical or
semantic elements and the free play of poetic artifice. Conte
employs the semiotic approaches of Barthes, Eco, and Riffaterre to define
these new compositional methods and to interpret the meaning of form in
contemporary poetry.
Unending Design provides both an
overview of postmodern aesthetics and a penetrating analysis of the
distinct forms of contemporary poetry. It will be welcomed by anyone
interested in American poetry in particular and postmodernism more
generally.
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 Editor, Dictionary of Literary
Biography 193: American Poets Since World War II (Sixth Series).
Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1998, xxiii,
451 pp.
Editor, Dictionary of Literary
Biography 169: American Poets Since World War II (Fifth Series).
Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1996, xviii, 404 pp.
Editor, Dictionary of Literary
Biography 165: American Poets Since World War II (Fourth Series).
Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1996, xviii, 377 pp.
From 1995 to 1998 I edited a three-volume
series of the Dictionary of Literary
Biography on American Poets Since World War II that contains critically
informed and biographically illustrated essays on a total of 78 poets in over
1200 pages. As Editor of the series
I intended to address four prominent and sometimes antithetical coalitions in
contemporary poetry—traditional formalism, Language and performance poetries,
the postconfessional lyric, and multicultural poetics.
In my critical introduction to the series, I provide an historical
overview that treats three generations of postmodern poets:
those born shortly after the turn of the century and whose work appears
under the shadow of high modernist achievements; a postwar generation of poets
who are included among the Black Mountain, Beat, confessional, and New York
schools; and a third generation of contemporary poets, born after the second
World War, whose practice is resistant to both the politics and the poetics of
modernism. Widely held in research
and major public libraries, these volumes are now available online through Gale Literary Databases.
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