{"id":1208,"date":"2019-12-31T12:39:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-31T11:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/?post_type=article&#038;p=1208"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T11:46:14","slug":"readability-thresholds-xenography-and-speculative-fiction","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/article\/readability-thresholds-xenography-and-speculative-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Readability Thresholds: Xenography and Speculative Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The unreadable and the illegible tend to be treated as the \u201cother\u201d of writing. Playing on one of the meanings of xenography \u2013 writing in a language unknown to the writer \u2013 this paper explores the possibility that the metaphorical \u201cgravity assist\u201d of literature, rather than engaging the resources of content and imagination, actually resides in the cognitively inaccessible layers of writing as a material phenomenon. If we accept Harman\u2019s definition of realism as something that can\u2019t be translated into human knowledge without energy loss, regions of unintelligibility in literary writing take on a completely different meaning, and appear as zones coinciding with the asemic material exteriority, equally unavailable to thought and mimesis. Writings of Thomas Ligotti (The Red Tower), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia) and Mark Z. Danielewski (The Familiar) are examined in the light of various atypical formal devices they use to convey a certain \u201cotherness,\u201d introducing varying degrees of unreadability as a response to the \u201cinscrutability of the Real itself\u201d (Fisher) and enforcing new types of non-hierarchical distribution of agency between writer, reader and text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The unreadable and the illegible tend to be treated as the \u201cother\u201d of writing. Playing on one of the meanings of xenography \u2013 writing in a language unknown to the writer \u2013 this paper explores the possibility that the metaphorical \u201cgravity assist\u201d of literature, rather than engaging the resources of content and imagination, actually resides &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1199,"menu_order":0,"template":"","tags":[862,857,856,860,861,858,859,855],"class_list":["post-1208","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-danielewski","tag-ligotti","tag-materialism","tag-negarestani","tag-speculative-fiction","tag-the-illegible","tag-the-unreadable","tag-xenography"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffstopenpress.ffst.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}