“There are many fine studies of Dada, but Kurt Beals’s Wireless Dada is unique in offering a genuine alternative to the familiar narrative that Dada radical experimentation was first and foremost a response to the violence and horror of WWI. On the contrary, Beals argues, it was the breakthrough technology of the period—especially telegraphy, with its new conception of language, punctuation, and wireless information—that ushered in the new poetics. And further, it was the telegraph that undermined any conception of language as a means of pure, authentic self-expression and paved the way for a more capacious sense of poetry. Beals has produced a study as persuasively argued as it is elegantly written.” —Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
"Wireless Dada offers a new and consistent reading of one of the most enigmatic movements of twentieth-century literature. It is an important, original, and far-reaching contribution not only to literary studies but also to the cultural and media history of the twentieth century.” —Wolf Kittler, author of Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie (The Birth of the Partisan out of the Spirit of Poetry)
"Telegraphic poetics addresses the stuff of non- or low-level semantic communication, be it electronic or in print, and how it relates to the cultural product. Beals enriches this examination of the history of the telegraph (and related inventions) by looking at how creative artists perceived the new technology . . . In its broadest implications, this study extends beyond literary history to communication and information studies." —J. M. Jeep, Miami University in CHOICE
"Viewing artistic practice as part of a broader shift in communication technologies where meaning and personality give way to a system of nodes exchanging information, Wireless Dada helps us to uncover a new model for Dada poetics: the author is replaced with the transcriber, the cryptographer, the medium, and the telegraph operator." —Michael Subialka, EuropeNow
