2016 Theses Master's

Spatial Denotation: Towards a Schematic Reading of Vito Acconci’s “CONTACTS/CONTEXTS (FRAME OF REFERENCE): ten pages of reading Roget’s Thesaurus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965)

Fuhrman, Emily

In Vito Acconci's “CONTACTS/CONTEXTS (FRAME OF REFERENCE): ten pages of reading Roget’s Thesaurus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965),” the act of reading becomes a process of spatial navigation. Despite the rearrangement, deconstruction, and recomposition Roget's Thesaurus undergoes in the poem, it is only through the iterative nature of Acconci's methodical defamiliarization that a trace rendering of the thesaurus, its representation as a structure disrupted, can emerge.