Recent Articles,
Interviews, and Reviews
Literary and Cultural Criticism
Poetry and Poetics
"The Turn to
Language and the 1960s"
Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Fall 2002)
"The Lost America of Love: A
Genealogy"
Genre 33, nos. 3–4 (forthcoming, 2001)
Love beckons, and I decide. I want to account for a particular
version of "love" in its intersection with poetry as a construction of
postmodern American poetics: from its apex among postwar writers grouped
together as "the New American Poets" to its decline and fall with
poets of the succeeding generation, the Language School. In the genealogy of
American poetry, love is a supreme concept of value that unites "the
enduring experience of life," in Robert Creeley's formulation, with
literary form. Love is decisive, its presence not to be disputed. . . .
The Lost America
of Love is the title Emersonian critic Sherman Paul adopted for his book of
reflections on the poetry of Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan,
published in 1981. . . . As an exemplary instance of the reception of the New
Americans, Paul's books of fragmented, holistic, and often diaristic readings
marks the conjunction of poetic form and literary value under the aspect of
"love." The result is an unapologetic poets of "presence,"
one that would be formally challenged by the Language School in poetry during
the next decade, and that would be theoretically dismantled by the coming
triumvirate of poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and post-Marxist criticism as
well. But it is precisely because the literary horizon of The Lost America of
Love has been superseded that it provides a fascinating example of the
postwar construction of the ideology of love.
"The Secret History of the Equal Sign:
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Between Discourse and Text"
Poetics Today 20, no. 4 (Winter 1999)
Avant-gardes, in breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous author in favor of both the work and its immediate reception within its community, frequently employ strategies of "multiple authorship," in which the work is positioned between two or more authors, toward a horizon of collective practice or politics. Any theory of the avant-garde must take into account, not only the poetics of its devices of defamiliarization and their relation to the construction of new meaning, but its stakes in the discursive community defined by means of its literary practices. This essay discusses several examples of avant-garde multiauthorship developed by writers of the Language School: the collective authorship represented by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other literary journals; Legend, a multiauthored experimental poem by five authors; two poems written under the title "Non-Events" by the author and Steve Benson; and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's collaborative novel The Wide Road. Michel Foucault's concept of "discursive formation" and Julia Kristeva's dialectic of "symbolic" and "semiotic" provide critical terms for an approach to the politics of community enacted in works of the avant-garde. These cultural politics, and their implications for the genres of poetry and poetics, continue in the contemporary form of the poetics Listserv, itself seen as a form of multiauthorship. Click for on-line version.
Review of “Masocriticism” by Paul Mann
Textual Practice 14 no. 1 (Spring 2000)
Paul Mann wanted to write a dark book. As an example of criticism en abime, Masocriticism is the darkest book he could imagine. In it, the author flaunts the privileges of critical negativity as the perverse repetition of a fin-de-siècle aesthetics that he identifies everywhere as our common culture. Disposing of what he proposes, destroying what he produces, Mann wants to take to the limit, once and for all, what he see as the fatal paradoxes of contemporary critical practice as both object and method.
"The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzky to Detroit
Techno"
Qui Parle 11, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1997 [appeared Fall 1999])
Reconciling radical form with social agency is the burden of
any new consideration of the avant-garde. . . .
We will first
consider, as a primary example of avant-garde practice with emergent social
meanings, the work of Soviet constructivist artist El Lissitzky. Lissitzky's
well-known series of works titled Prouns (1919-1925) are, as equally the
work of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, quintessential examples of radical
modernism. As with the case of Stein's media celebrity late in her career, these
works demand an account in relation to the development of a mass-cultural
aesthetics in Lissitzky's work in typography and design, particularly in the
1930s international Soviet periodical USSR in Construction. While some
critics see a moment of "radical freedom" in the Prouns, the
relation between that freedom and the later social realism but also Stalinist
politics of his mass-public design work is still under debate. . . .
The constructivist
moment is an elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social
negativity—the experience of rupture, an act of refusal—invokes a
fantasmatic future: a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation.
Constructivism, in this sense, stabilizes crisis as it puts art into production
toward imaginary ends; it asks us to think of the world in impossible ways. It
is not restricted to the historical avant-garde: another manifestation of the
constructivist moment, originating far from restricted codes and institutional
cultures, can be found in the emergence of an international style of avant-garde
music known as "Detroit techno" that has developed over the past
fifteen years. Of the many alternative music subcultures in Detroit, techno is
marked for its international fame (it has established an image of avant-garde
Detroit firmly in youth subcultures in Europe) but also for its virtual
unavailability in Detroit. . . .
"What I See in How I Became Hettie Jones"
In Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace, eds. Girls Who Wore Black: Women
Writing the Beat Generation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002);
Originally published in Poetics Journal 10 (1998)
"New Modernist Studies" (Review article)
Criticism 41, no. 2 (Spring 1999)
Review of The Politics of Time: Modernity and the
Avant-Garde,
by Peter Osborne; The Gender of Modernity, by Rita Felski; and Ghostlier
Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, by Michael Davidson.
A wide range of
recovery projects in the new modernist studies has uncovered a series of works,
such as the poetry of experimental women writers or the hybrid forms of the
Harlem Renaissance, whose "politics of time" may be seen as critical
alternatives to modernism's purported denial of modernity.
"An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans"
Modernism/Modernity 5, no. 2 (1998)
Socially reflexive subjectivity is what The Making of Americans is about and what it makes as well. Seeing the work in terms of such a social reproduction of subjectivity, however, is very different from the canonical view of The Making of Americans' epochal horizon shift, its move from social narration to material textuality at the emergence of American modernism. . . . To do justice to the micropolitics of Stein's textual unfolding, a close reading of The Making of Americans is necessary, even as it risks taking up as much textual space as the work itself in an analysis interminable of Stein's thematic and formal development. What follows, therefore, will be a discussion of a sequence of key passages in the work's unfolding horizons of narration and self-consciousness [that show how] Stein's crucial rewriting of the Oedipal mother in terms of a social matrix allows her successfully to develop a non-Oedipal model of social subjectivity. . . . Stein's masterpiece, in her terms and arguably as well in ours, is a social text in which processes of identification and loss are worked through in a narrative of family history. What results are not only Stein's famous style of metalinguistic repetition but also a poetics of identity as a construction in which, as in her title, Americans are made. Click for on-line version.
"New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary: From Coleridge to
Jackson Mac Low"
Poetics Today 18, no. 2 (Summer 1997)
This essay charts the development in American modernist and
postmodernist poetics of the use of preestablished, nonauthorial "poetic
vocabularies" for literary composition. While the Coleridgean concept of
"poetic diction" is normative and hierarchical in its separation of
appropriate and inappropriate lexicons for literature, "poetic
vocabulary" is both open-ended and critical, allowing the "new
meaning" of jargons, dialects, idioms, and technical senses into poetry.
The emergence of "poetic vocabulary" may be discerned in a historicist
reading of the Coleridgean account of "poetic diction" that extends
Paul Hamilton's account of the criticality of the term desynonymy toward
Coleridge's synthesis of the demands of "new meaning" in experimental
poetry, with his call for a readership of "suitable interpreters" who
would preserve distinctions between terms. This Coleridgean synthesis directly
influenced the conception and articulation of BASIC English by I. A. Richards
and C. K. Ogden, who wished to reduce the vocabulary of English in order to
create a universal second language that would be transparent to the "new
meanings" of science, industry, and commerce.
Ogden and Richards's
experiment in modern linguistic hygiene was quickly noticed by modernist
practitioners of experimental poetry, and in 1932 the expatriate journal transition
published a translation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake into BASIC
English, thus placing side by side "the simplest and most complex languages
of man." The American poet Louis Zukofsky, inspired by BASIC's delimited
vocabulary of 850 words, in turn made literary works using preestablished
vocabularies, such as his early experimental text "Thanks to the
Dictionary." Zukofsky also wrote a critique of Ogden and Richards's BASIC
and continued to use delimited vocabularies in his experimental texts. The
postmodern American poet Jackson Mac Low directly incorporated the 850-word
BASIC vocabulary in many experimental texts; vocabularies such as BASIC become
the "source texts" that, through the application of compositional
rules, yield the "target forms" of Mac Low's poetic work. This
movement from "source text" to "target form" is reenacted in
the reading and production of Mac Low's works according to the careful
instructions of his prefaces. Mac Low's work identifies an ethics of reading as
well as a notion of community with the arbitrariness and constructedness of his
pregiven poetic vocabularies.
"Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and
Ilya Kabakov"
In Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
On-line version: Postmodern Culture 3, no. 2 (1993)
The break-up of official culture in the Soviet Union led to aesthetic developments characterized by an intense, utopian, and metaphysically speculative subjectivity. Identifying these "post-Soviet" developments with postmodernism would be to misunderstand them, however. Aspects of this subjectivity can be seen in the installations and texts of Ilya Kabakov, developing out of Moscow conceptual art originating in the 1970s and now being shown in museums in the West, and in the poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, representative of the 1980s "meta" literature from Moscow and Leningrad, now appearing in American translations. Both projects, while formally very different, dismantle Soviet authority in ways that are more culturally specific than generically postmodern. Click for on-line version.