Cirrus@Austlit

'In the recent NSW floods our local council ran out of “Road Closed” signs. On side roads farmers painted their own on sheets of tin. Only the main highway to town was interpolated with an official yellow sign in the middle of the bitumen. When the waters subsided, no-one took the sign down. On swerving around the barricade every morning I was acutely conscious of breaking a code. I was surprised at how much power the words exerted – in ignoring the sign I transgressed the norms of its legibility. In John Kinsella’s new book Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics, published in the Palgrave series “Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics”, Kinsella employs the term “legibility” to refer to more than just the “readability” of a text. Whether a text is “legible” he argues is contingent upon the reader being versed in the customs, conventions and codes inherent to its creation. His interest is pragmatic – understanding the structures and systems intrinsic to the creation of “signs and inscriptions” of ruling discourses “is pivotal to the ability to resist them” (p. 15).' (Introduction)