The Fate of Echo
…above all, the nymph Echo. In Ovid's characterization:
She liked to chatter But had no power of speech except the power To answer in the words she last had heard… Echo always says the last thing she hears, and nothing further.
Echo, literally, always has the last word. And she sets the first example for many of the writers included here: loquacious, patient, rule bound, recontextualizing language in a mode of strict citation. Ostensibly a passive victim of the wrath of Juno, Echo in fact becomes a model of Oulipean ingenuity: continuing to communicate in her restricted state with far more personal purpose than her earlier gossiping, turning constraint to her advantage, appropriating other's language to her own ends, "making do" as a verbal bricoleuse.
Against Expression puts proof to the mythology of figures such as Echo, recognizing their tactics not just as allegorical conceits or fictional characterizations but as viable strategies for actual authors in their own rights. Moreover, this anthology will separate those who would rather read about Menard or Flaubert's bonhommes from those who dream of actually reading what they supposedly spent so much time – inspired, sly, compulsive, obstinate, pernicious, mechanical – copying out. Here, then, is the legacy of Echo, recontextualized as the birthright of an author rather than a victim, and this is her fully reconceptualized challenge to those who would instead chose the confession of Narcissus or the romance of Orpheus as their muse.
– Craig Dworkin, "The Fate of Echo" Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing