Author: Louis Bury

Louis Bury is an English Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, at work upon a constraint-based dissertation about constraint-based writing. He teaches literature at NYU and plays poker semi-professionally. Recent dissertation work appears in Jacket Magazine, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Shampoo, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.

Essays in EBR by Louis Bury

2010-04-01

Absences, Negations, Voids

Examining Doug Nufer's Negativeland, a constraint-based text, Louis Bury adopts the same constraint as the novel - an approach NOT dissimilar to his treatment of Abish's Alphabetical Africa. In this case, the constraint is a prohibition against sentences lacking "some form of negation" - a commitment not unlike the affirmation of negativity.

Louis Bury
2010-04-03

Abish's Africa

Abish's Alphabetical Africa is pondered here, in a critifiction by Louis Bury. Bury's text is written - like the novel itself - under constraint: each critical query begins with a new letter of the alphabet. Culminating in "Zeugma," the essay explores the poetics of Abish's linguistic experiment from somewhere close to the inside. (Doug Nufer's Negativeland gets a similar - though more subtle - treatment in another Bury piece.)

Louis Bury