Anarchists in the Academy : Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry

A provocative text that uses postanarchism to explore contemporary poetry and digital media.

Dani Spinosa takes up anarchism’s power as a cultural and artistic ideology, rather than as a political philosophy, with a persistent emphasis on the common. She demonstrates how postanarchism offers a useful theoretical context for poetry that is not explicitly political—specifically for the contemporary experimental poem with its characteristic challenges to subjectivity, representation, authorial power, and conventional constructions of the reader-text relationship. Her case studies of sixteen texts make a bold move toward politicizing readers and imbuing literary theory with an activist praxis—a sharp hope. This is a provocative volume for those interested in contemporary poetics, experimental literatures, and the digital humanities.Case Studies: Jim Andrews, Christian Bök, Mez Breeze, John Cage, Andy Campbell, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Howe, Jackson Mac Low, Erín Moure [Erin Mouré], Harryette Mullen, bpNichol, Vanessa Place, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, W. Mark Sutherland, and Darren Wershler.

"Anarchists in the Academy will provoke the poetics community and tempt us to reconsider how the mainstream of contemporary poetics has fundamentally misread some poets while overlooking others, particularly for electronic poetry. Reactions, disputes, exhortations, and fast flowing currents of productive new work are sure to follow the channel cut here by Spinosa and to redraw our understanding of radical contemporary poetics."