In Carl Lavery and Rezvan Zandieh’s chapter Artaud is afforded further examination. By adopting a hyphenated notion of a ‘re-turn’, Lavery and Zandieh challenge a historiography that would describe Artaud’s impact as being on the medium or discipline of theatre alone. Their ‘re-turn’ is not predicated on restoring an originary Artaud, nor does it aim to provide yet another reading or interpretation of his artistic work. By proposing a particular mode of arranging bodies and objects in time and space, Artaud’s theatricality overspills its disciplinary enclosure and informs other artforms. They posit Artaud as a performance theorist whose ideas allow for a unique take on the indeterminate borderline existing between theatre, conceptualism and installation art. To investigate that liminal fold, they place Artaud in dialogue with artist Christian Boltanski, whose relationship with theatre and performance they tease out.

This essay traces the anti-Bildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism, in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982). While Acker inherits Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression, these themes are formally developed through the prism of punk and feminist conceptual art and performance. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Acker’s work prompts us to further consider her relationship to surrealism and the modernist avant-garde. While Acker’s homage to Bataille in the early novels signals a brazen ’theft’ of the male avant-garde tradition for feminist subversive ends, Great Expectations experiments with form and language in order to evacuate the Bildungsroman of its bourgeois (gendered) claims to moral authority and insight. While extreme experience in Bataille’s literary work holds out the promise of an affirmation of sorts, the excoriating emotional masochism of Acker’s characters tilts towards nihilism. And yet both Bataille and Acker draw on the Bildungsroman even as they decondition the humanist subject that lies at its very core, straining at the limits of language to represent the vertiginous intensity of affective life and the dissolution of desire into abjection.

Overview is inseparable from its retrospective dimension in any look back on the evolution of the codex under shifting technical conditions, from moveable type to pixel backlight. A “cross-sectional” approach to the book/text/medium triad involves chapters arranged here in three respective pairs. First (Part I): the plastic art of the codex, divided between the graphics of easel treatment and conceptual book sculpture. Next (Part II): in close comparison with such material form, an intensive reading of phonemic wording – in its mediating linguistic texture – thrown into relief by visual rather than verbal “signage” in narrative cinema as an alternative time-based medium. Finally (Part III): the ontology of human speech pursued, over against its media ideology, by contemporary theorists Giorgio Agamben and Friedrich Kittler. The introduction also looks back on the “speakwrite” in George Orwell’s 1984 as a mode of dictation contrasted with the transgressive sensuality of handwriting on outmoded paper pages early in the novel.