Night-glory: cut-up literature, anarchism, and the question of the subject

Ernstmeyer, Phillip W

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/90708 Copy

Description

Title

Night-glory: cut-up literature, anarchism, and the question of the subject

Author(s)

Ernstmeyer, Phillip W

Issue Date

2016-02-01

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Nelson, Cary

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Nelson, Cary

Committee Member(s)

• Rothberg, Michael
• Parker, Robert D.
• Brunner, Edward

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Cut-Up
• Cut-Up Technique
• Cut-Up Method
• Fold-in
• Voltairine de Cleyre
• Gertrude Stein
• William S. Burroughs
• Kathy Acker
• Kenji Siratori
• Anarchism
• Post-anarchism
• Post-left anarchy

Abstract

"This dissertation examines the anarchic practices implicit to literary texts composed through the cut-up technique. It argues that the aleatory and processual experiments in Gertrude Stein's, William S. Burroughs', Kathy Acker's, and Kenji Siratori's cut-up works appeal to principles of embodiment, affect, and affinity foundational for anarchist practices of direct action, horizontal organization, and voluntary cooperation. Counter to anarchism’s individualist and socialist traditions, which consistently install the humanist subject at the center of radical thought, the form of those cut-up works represents a post-anarchist ethics that assumes the subject’s anarchic and unconditional relation to the figure of the neighbor. In other words, this dissertation argues that cut-up literature’s extreme literary approach and eccentric formal effects exhibit a revolutionary language without a subject — without an ""origin"" or a ""ruler"" — in which the other speaks first and foremost. Repositioning the place of the neighbor in relation to the anarchic subject, this other, alien, cut up language radically re-imagines familiar political terms (race, gender, and sexuality) for the hyperconnected, globalized 21st Century."

Graduation Semester

2016-05

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90708

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Phillip Ernstmeyer

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