Elisabeth Tonnard

Annette Gilbert from the Freie Universität Berlin edited a new anthology on books that write through existing literature. Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature is presented as a bilingual German-English edition and includes good photographs of the books discussed. 

From the publisher: “Since the 1960s, writers have radically challenged the notion of originality and creativity in literature. They stopped writing new texts for their books and instead drew upon pre-existing books: canonical texts of world literature or intellectual history are transcribed by hand, edited, altered, alphabetically arranged or simply copied and republished under one’s own name. By now Appropriation Literature amounts to a critical mass that has generated its own tradition. The present anthology is the first to give an international overview of the phenomenon, presenting 126 books and projects by over 90 authors.”

My books Let us go then, you and I, The Man of the Crowd, In this Dark Wood, The Story of a Young Gentleman and “Speak! eyes – En zie! are discussed in the anthology amidst a plethora of interesting projects.