Anticipatory plagiarism and the ex post facto–garde

Abstract

This essay uses experimental writing and reading practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (such as those of the Oulipo or of conceptual writers) to dyschronously uncover or recover pleasures in premodern texts that have been difficult to articulate or were completely unrecognizable as potentially pleasurable. In particular, it deploys the Oulipian concept of anticipatory plagiarism to call attention to this process by which aesthetic pleasures occur well before they are culturally or socially construed.postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2013) 4, 305-309.