"How else might 'essays' be written? 'Essaying Essays,' writes Richard Kostelanetz, 'are those printed pieces that essay to redefine the genre. By realizing the other ways of doing what essays have traditionally done, they are essays twice over, confronting not only their particular subjects but, by implication, alternative possibilities for the form itself.' The common denominator of the materials included in this anthology is their implied movement toward a redefinition of the action of criticism; experimentation, previously confined to all areas of art and science, attempts, now, to realize its critical analogue. Moving beyond its original definition as a system of signs about and separate from the various objects of investigation, the essay begins to interact with the semiotic structure of content itself such that the form of the investigation may even assume the form of the investigated object. The evolutionary nature of critical structures can thus unfold, with varying degrees of complexity, the syntactical, rhetorical, and semantical history of innovations in language, art, literature, and genres inchoate. Robert Smithson, Gertrude Stein, Claes Oldenburg, El Lissitsky, Edward T. Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Serra, Timothy Leary, Ad Reinhardt, R. Buckminster Fuller, F. T. Marinetti, W.H. Auden, Quentin Fiore, and a variety of other poets, painters, sculptors, composers, physicists, anthropologists, and philosophers, all cooperate here to construct a mode of communication which is no longer bound to specific categories of referentiality nor, consequently, to manipulated divisions of aesthetic labor." -- from inside wrapper.