Diacriticisms!

Those who feel passionately enough to subscribe to a philosophy of punctuation tend to locate themselves in relation to two entrenched, diametrically opposed perspectives. Acolytes of the first believe that punctuation should function "as notation, not expression."¹ In its most limited and prescriptive applications, punctuation might structure the sentence's grammar, but should not assign semantic value; commas and periods work simply as invisible pegs on which the author's sentiments are latticed and strung. The opposition, in contrast, revels in punctuation's ability to produce meaning. Within their lines, the dash might—quickly!—speed the eye through a hurried passage, or the colon become a spring-loaded catapult: projecting the reader toward the sentence's final, conclusive full stop. To gauge by the consistently smart and readable Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody reels merrily in the company of the latter camp. Brody flings marks onto her pages by the fistful; slashes, brackets, and parentheses refract her own interpretations into double- and triple-readings. And herein lie both the joy and the genius of Brody's approach, which perfectly complements the book's argument: that "punctuation is performative" (6). Brody's text not only documents how punctuation might produce art, politics, and play but performs its myriad, often contradictory functions within the confines of its own paperback cover.

This singular book arrives at an opportune cultural moment. Public interest in punctuation is high, evinced in part by the peculiar popularity of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003); there are murmurs of a coming "textual turn" in criticism; and the burgeoning discipline of textual studies has begun to explore how "features such as punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, white space and marginalia, marks that traditionally have been ignored in literary criticism, can be examined for their contribution to a text's meaning."² Although Brody does not identify explicitly with textual studies, her work furthers its concerns: her second chapter, for example, interprets the ellipsis in Invisible Man as a formal strategy by which Ellison signifies blackness as absent-presence, as both what "black is . . ." and what "black ain't . . ." (73). This text is revolutionary, however, in its expansion of punctuation beyond "the stage of the page" (26). By considering marks through the lens of cultural and visual studies, performance theory, and questions of time and space, Brody breathes new life into the study of punctuation, freeing the topic from its long-standing confinement to linguistics, grammar, and bibliography. Punctuation no longer acts as a one-way conduit, through which the two-dimensional text becomes a 3-D series of sounds or gestures. Instead, periods, ellipses, hyphens, and quotation marks become entities in their own right, marks whose "paradoxical performances produce excessive meaning" (5) not only in bodies of text but (for instance) on the human bodies Yayoi Kusama paints with polka dots. Brody's deft handling of a dazzling array of sources (the unlikely assemblage includes Robert Hooke and Bharati Mukherjee, Theodore Roosevelt and Miranda July, Mira Schor's Wet and Margaret Edson's Wit) testifies to the novelty, ambition, and far-reaching applications of the work.

Such applications extend to queer studies. Readers of GLQ will be rightly interested in the fourth chapter, "'Queer' Quotation Marks," in which Brody reads marks of quotation as "a queer sign and a sign of queering" (112), particularly in their ability to "revive and instantiate 'prior' performances across space and time" (108). The hypothesis is beautifully borne out through "a sampling of the queer, quotidian performances of quotation in works by the contemporary dancer/ choreographer Bill T. Jones" (109). This chapter joins recent interest in queer modes of time, space, and memory with punctuation's ability to destabilize and recontextualize, to "supplement, subvert, amplify, or queer what is taken to be normative" (109). The queer sensibilities of Punctuation, however, permeate the book beyond this chapter. In the engrossing third section ("Hyphen-Nations"), for example, Brody reads the hyphen "as a productive site of contestation that can provide agency to subjects who seek to mark their historical...