Reading the Illegible

Editing this special issue of Amodern was done, one could say, under the influence, in a reader-to-reader relationship with Craig Dworkin’s 2003 monographic study of “a tradition of poetic illegibility.” [1] Having read for over a decade now under the influence of his poetry and critical work, I borrowed the title from Dworkin’s book. What is more, in keeping with his impetus as projected there and extended in his most recent collection of essays, No Medium, I called for contributions that could think through the inter-relatedness of two things in an ambitious manner: the pressure put on the poetic imagination (for better and worse) by limit-cases of il/legibility; and technical and conceptual innovations in reading practices that have somehow shifted the horizonal divide-lines between the legible and illegible via a relationship to academic research. [2]