Cultural Text Studies is a research project initiated by the Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics at Aalborg University. The present introductory volume launches a series of themed monographs which will be edited by researchers at the Dept., occasionally aided by friends and associates from other programmes. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text. CTS -- An Introduction is a volume authored by present and past members of the English programme's teaching staff in the fields of culture, literature, and media studies. The essays range widely in terms of the period, genre, and medium of the texts investigated. Focus areas include Victorian literature and art; high modernism, especially approached from the point of view of a centre/margin discourse; and finally postmodernist aesthetics and its embedded move from literary into cultural studies, as witnessed by essays on world music, shoes, Hollywood, the post-ironic, the deterritorialised, and the post-human condition as cultural texts.

The epistemic creative writer is not merely an expressive writer, a writer who writes for creative writing programs at diverse university colleges. Rather, the epistemic creative writer is the writer who understands that in order to say something useful you must step out of the space that engages your ego. Awareness of what really matters comes from the contemplation of the futility of words. Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. This book is about extracting what writing means to a few writers who formulate ideas about creative writing without, however, making claims to instruction. Can creative writing that produces knowledge be taught without a method? Samuel Beckett, Raymond Federman, Gertrude Stein, Jacques Lacan, Frank O'Hara, Douglas Hofstadter, Brian Rotman, Herman Melville, Kathy Acker, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Markson, Andrei Codrescu, and a host of others, gather here to offer an answer. -- "Camelia Elias speaks to the reader from that place where the language of the birds becomes the language of silence." (Patrick Blackburn, Professor of Formal Logic, Roskilde University)

In these 2 volumes Enrique gathers fresh voices and sharp tongues to speak of the art of Tarot as the art of living magically. Forty-seven tarot luminaries (readers, historians, philosophers, magicians, and scientists alike) gather here to offer unique perspectives on what we can think of as divination with bones, human bones. Artists, deck creators, and modern-day neo-platonists follow Enrique's lead, letting themselves be enchanted by the piper at the gate of games. Some of the central questions that Enrique deals with are: do we read for the symbol, or the image? Do we read for the narrative that the cards create or their potential for transformation? Do we read for the plot, the poetry, or the formal properties? We find Enrique holding the torch and asking everybody the same questions: how do we experience the tarot? Through symbolic readings or through interacting with the image? While it is clear that he goes with the latter, he gives everyone a chance to state their preferences. But he doesn't stop there. He wants to see what the argument is for such preferences. What are the motivations in considering where images take us? How do the images do that? Why do we go to fortunetellers? My own contribution to this is to suggest that we read cards for the magic of narrative. We go to fortunetellers to see others play with our lives. Here are 47 of them. -- CAMELIA ELIAS, "HE RECO ME: ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ'S POETICS OF DIVINATION"

This is a book of fragments and prose poetry celebrating what mothers try to pass on to their children: a sense of how to be grateful for the experiences in life that can be said to be not only beautiful but also significant in form. The author's own mother, a logician, emerges as a powerful woman who has things to say to people she encounters through mediation: mathematicians, prophets, lovers, and fools. The introduction to the collection is an informative memoir which entangles the personal essay with the formal properties of writing that can be said to be both epistemic, creating a certain kind of knowledge, and also creative in terms of approaches to narrative.

Pulverizing Portraits provides the first book-length study of contemporary American poet Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's poetry is significant because it situates itself in relation to current debates about the state of poetry, creative writing in the academia, and the importance of drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to poetry via visual aesthe-tics, poststructuralist literary and theoretical perspectives, and philosophy. Camelia Elias takes a look at what characterizes contemporary American prose poetry, namely an intensified awareness of being close to something. Poets such as Lynn Emanuel have been increasingly concerned with poetry as a tool for cultural criticism which constantly redefines our poetic discourse. Elias traces the power of Emanuel's writing and looks at her subtleties in combining intrinsic and formal constraints in poetry with extrinsic and socio-historical methodologies. Elias's analyses of Emanuel's poetic genius culminate in a plethora of references which bring together painters, philosophers, poets, critics, and actors. Thus, the poet's father, the painter Akiba Emanuel, meets Giorgio Agamben, Charles Simic, Gertrude Stein, and Sharon Stone. They all contribute to voicing the world's "interminable speeches."

This volume of prose poems takes the reader through a journey which starts in the living-room. At the core of the collection are a number of Socratic dialogic exchanges between the main speaker of each poem and a number of other figures (fictional and non-fictional). The initiating conversations between a woman and a man continue through dialogues between the woman speaker and other voices (mainly academics and writers) and culminate with exchanges between the woman's voice and that of literary protagonists. There is an intended symmetry at work between the poems which are dedicated to real-life authors and the poems which are dedicated to fictional characters. The poems show how literature is entangled with the geography of being on more than one level