Stealing Styles. Goldsmith and Derrida, Place and Cixous

Abstract

The “uncreative writing” movement has quickly and firmly established its position as one of the prime examples for a genuinely twenty-first-century poetics. With regards to stylistics on the level of the text, the most glaring feature of works like Kenneth Goldsmith's “Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Jacques Derrida” (a musical reading/rendition of parts of Derrida's Of Grammatology) or Vanessa Place's “The laugh of the Minotaur” (an almost word-for-word retyping of Hélène Cixous's “The laugh of the Medusa”) is, quite simply, not to have a personal literary style at all. Despite its first (non-)appearance, this lack does not make the question of style obsolete—on the contrary: where other authors’ styles are stolen, the focus shifts to the specific styles of stealing themselves. This multilayered movement, the article argues, directly responds to a specific set of problems in post-structuralist literary theory and provides a key contribution towards (re)conceptualizing what literary style is—or, rather, was—in the first place.