Introduction

I began to think with the word ’pataphilology around 2001, as a way of grouping a dossier of very strange texts that ranged in date of origin from the 1860s through the 1990s and in genre from avant-garde literature through the work of outsid-ers, hallucinators, schizophrenics, and principled refuseniks to normal (and normative) language practices. Sometimes these texts (many of which are gathered in the epoch-marking 1998 anthology Imagining Langugae, edited by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery) deploy perfectly respectable philological method-ologies, but in a manner which leads to bizarre and even oth-erworldly results; at other times new philologies are invented, then deployed to produce remarkable and moving documents. Reading these works, I felt as though I had entered an alternate world in which everything I knew had somehow been subtly changed, where everything was itself and yet unsettlingly differ-ent at the same time.