Serrano, Vincenz

Jacquelyn Ardam, writing “The ABCs of Conceptual Writing,” outlines the dynamics of alphabetic structure in innovative and experimental writing in Europe and North America. For Ardam, the “alphabetic sequence is not just any arbitrary organizational tool: it is, in fact, the arbitrary tool for organizing language” (137; emphasis in original). Literary works informed by alphabetical structures have been typified by “a distinctively orderly aesthetic” that functions as “a metaphor for order or power” while at the same time finding ways to “play with, alter, and even break down the conventions of alphabetical order” (138). Moreover, for Ardam, alphabetically ordered literary works are “formally arbitrary but culturally meaningful”; they “enable both totalizing and atomistic views of words and their worlds” and thus interrogate “linear reading practices” (143). My presentation aims to explore how an alphabetically-structured multimedia work such as Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) enacts the formal possibilities and limitations of alphabetic form in its attempt to render the history, politics, and culture of Southeast Asia: the alphabetic structure of CDOSEA indexes the archipelagic dynamics of a community typified by, in Elmo Gonzaga’s words, “plurality, fluidity, and inclusiveness” (125).