introduction to EVERYBODY'S AUTONOMY: Connective Reading and Collective Identity
Juliana Spahr, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001.

"WHAT WAS MY DESTINATION?"

As I read, however, I applied much personally, to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly, understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none. 'The path of my departure was free,' and there was none to lament my annihilation. My, person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?
--the creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.
--Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself

In Frankenstein, the creature learns to read by trickery. He looks through a peephole onto a family who is teaching Safie, who has come from afar, to read and speak in English and learns her lessons. When he learns to read, he has a series of questions: "What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?" He is, after all, a creature. So his learning to read is not expected or necessary. Rather, his reading allows him to ask those all-important questions about identity, allows him an identity, and allows readers to identify with him.

Less than fifteen years later but in the United States, Frederick Douglass asserts that reading is "the pathway from slavery to freedom" (49). Similar to the creature, Douglass in his narrative ponders the relationship between literacy and subjectivity and the political rights that accompany these. His narrative points out how to gain literacy is not only to master a cultural symbolic system, but also to participate in a culture. He makes this relationship literal in his narrative: literacy is a pathway to freedom. As is often noted, Douglass reads himself to emancipation, writes himself to subjectivity. Reading in his narrative is figured as productive and active, bound with agency. As he writes, "The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery" (55). Douglass does not learn that slavery is an evil through reading. This is readily evident to him. But he does learn how white culture talks about slavery; he learns the vocabulary of abolitionism; and he learns how one talks with others immersed in this culture. But at the same time, Douglass's narrative is not completely naïve about reading. While recognizing reading as an agent of socialization that allows entry into the freedoms that white culture controls, he also figures it as a potential predatory learning process that perpetuates assimilation. Douglass has moments where he is ambiguous about reading and notes that reading brought on the "very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read" (55). He continues, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. . . . It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder which to get out" (55).

One way Douglass counters this discontentment is through realizing reading as a communal, not an individual act. There are several examples of this. Douglass's life as a reader begins with Mrs. Auld teaching him. But soon she is told to abandon this project by her husband, and Douglass, who realizes he still needs others to learn to read, turns to his own wits and masters the system through communal trickery. He learns to read by trading bread for words with poor white children he meets on the street: "This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge" (53-54). And he finishes the unfinished lessons in Thomas Auld's Webster's Spelling Book. But neither of these is the ladder that leads out of the pit in which Douglass finds himself. This ladder is the word "abolition" which Douglass hears people using but does not understand. His response is to do the individualistic act and to look it up in the dictionary but this leads to little success because the dictionary just defines by tautology with the "act of abolishing." It is only when he encounters the word used in the discussion of slavery in the newspapers that, as he notes, "the light broke in upon me by degrees" (56). Or one moves from reading as a curse to reading as bread, as a liberatory ladder, as one learns through and with others. As one exchanges and as one converses with a culture. Once reading is recognized as dependent on community and the relationship between readers and works as a form of community itself, reading turns into a force that can be manipulated and used as a resistance tool to respond to the inhumanity of slavery.

I have put two unrelated stories-one fictional, one not-beside each other here as a beginning because both point to a link between reading and identity that emerges in the nineteenth century. It is emblematic, for instance, that the creature learns to read. Modern, western consciousness, these examples illustrate, is tied up with reading. This relation between consciousness and reading is a complex story, one riddled with related stories of class, educational access, missionaries, and alternate cultural literacies. This book does not tell these stories for these are huge stories, demanding historical, sociological, and legal knowledges beyond my scope. However, the general outlines of these stories point to something crucial and wonderful and also something dangerous in the intersection between reading and identity. The works I examine in this book tell similar stories: stories that acknowledge the dangers and stories that suggest possibilities for escaping the dangers through collective and connective models of reading, through collective identities.

"GETTING OUT OF THE WAY"

1. Do you love the audience?
Certainly we do. We show it by getting out of the way.
--Bruce Andrews (quoting John Cage), "Index"

What sort of selves works influence, encourage, or create is what this study is about.

The creature reads Milton's Paradise Lost and he learns to act as if he was in a grand drama between good and evil. He did not learn the in-between. Thus his failure.

Douglass reads and as he reads he learns to ask others about the word "abolition." Thus his success.

I argue in Everybody's Autonomy that what we read and how we read it matters. That a heavily plotted and symbolic novel, for example, encourages a different sort of reading practice than mixed-genre writing. While either work might effect readers in many different ways, the formal aspect of each must play a role in any consideration of reading.

I argue here that when we tackle literary criticism's central question of what sort of selves do works create, that we should value works that encourage connection. By connection here I mean works that present and engage with large, public worlds that are in turn shared with readers. I mean forms of writing that well represent and expand changing notions of the public, of everybody. And I mean forms of writing that take advantage of reading's dynamic and reciprocal nature. "You read," Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, "you mouth the transformed object across from you in its new state, other than what it had been" (DICTEE 131). In this context, it is crucial that the creature and Douglass both learn to read only with others. This most necessary of acts in modern society, is also one that we must learn with others, arduously. It has nothing natural about it. It is bound with exchange (the first things written supposedly are records of sale). It is a difficult translation-this move from symbol to letter to sound. And yet it is as these stories suggest, a defining one for how we think of ourselves.

My emphasis in this book is less on deciphering works, and instead on what sorts of communities works encourage. It has not been unusual to argue that reading leads to transcendence in forms like the novel because it allows identification with others. Similarly, I am interested in works that encourage communal readings. I would include identificatory moments in this. But would also want to include moments that are non-identifactory: moments where one realizes the limits of one's knowledge; moments of partial or qualified identification; moments where one realizes and respects unlikeness; moments where one connects with other readers (instead of characters). I am interested in works that look at the relation between reading and identity to comment on the nature of collectivity. Works that recognize reading's dangers, its potential exclusions, and work to make this relationship more productive. I am interested in works that use reading to contribute to, contest, and expand how we think of public (and thus cultural) spheres. I am interested in work that pursues cosmologies diverse enough for individual contestation and evaluation, yet that still have as their ultimate goal considerations of what sorts of humans reading encourages us to be.

I am not arguing here for a model reader or for a recognizable community, like my mother's reading group that meets every other Sunday. I have avoided writers whose work tends to be seen as representative of certain well defined group concerns (the way say Adrienne Rich's work represents a feminist community or Gloria Anzaldúa's a Chicana). My argument is more formal than sociological. And many of the works I examine here have been critiqued as apolitical formalism and for not adequately taking up representational concerns. Yet my turn to a different canon of works to address representational concerns is not because I feel well defined collective gestures are unimportant, but rather because I feel that expanding the range of works under consideration would also expand and add much to current discussions of identity, especially how individual identities negotiate within collectivities.

The main story of this book is told through the work of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Harryette Mullen, and Cha. By concentrating on works that use nonstandard English, multilingualism, puns, disconnected syntaxes, and repetition, Everybody's Autonomy argues for anarchic, in the sense of self-governing, approaches to reading. The works of these writers, rather than guiding readers through developmental structures to a neat box of a conclusion, encourage dynamic participation. Rather than rewarding readers for well-deciphered meaning and allusion, they reward readers for responsive involvement and for awareness of their limitations. Andrews, to choose just one example here, argues that reading at its best is a form of co-production. His writing, instead of having a clear poetic voice, has voices in the plural. And it is often composed of phrases and sentences that are multiply connected within the work (they tend to be joined by dashes and it is hard to tell where one ends or begins). This work only makes sense if one sees reading as dramatically reciprocal, as shareable, as connective.

While this attention to reading's connective moments is a value in its own right, I argue that this attention to readers has much to add to discussions of subjectivity. It is no coincidence, I argue, that the emphasis on reading as connective and communal in these works parallels the rise of a literature that addresses gender, ethnicity, and race. I also argue that there is a close relationship between this literature and consciousness raising. While it is often said that these works are not accessible because they are too experimental or too avant garde and thus dissolve subjectivity, I maintain that these writers instead directly engage the complicated claims around identity that come to the forefront of large social concerns in the late 1960s. But rather than the clear, singular voice and narrative of much of the literature that gets categorized as consciousness raising, these works propose group identities with room for individualistic response. Thus, my concentration in this study has been on the tension in these works between collectivity and individualism. For, in a crucial move, these works repeatedly relate reader autonomy to social, political, and cultural autonomy. Mullen's work, for example, concentrates not on an essential African-American culture, but rather locates the distinctiveness of African-American culture in its gathering and use of various cultures and in its respect of various sorts of autonomy. Her work avoids placing essentialist identities against performative identities and avoids juxtaposing orality against textuality by concentrating instead on cultural flows and exchanges without abandoning a racial consciousness.

Some of the questions I asked as I began writing were: is reading (and forms of writing other than prose) still relevant in the age of cultural studies?; what sort of cultural information does the formal construction of a work carry? That an attention to reading went more or less out of style after the 1980s and did not play much of a role in the turn to studies of literature's cultural roles concerned me. And so this book is an attempt to propose a theory of reading that is in dialogue with the concerns of race and ethnic studies. I argue that these works of autonomy are a rich yet often overlooked tradition in the literature of minority, immigrant, exile, and/or postcolonial experience. One other goal, thus, of this book is to place what are often considered marginal forms of American literature in a larger, cross-cultural context.

It is worth noting in this context that the works on which I have concentrated in this study defy genre conventions. Most often these works are considered to be poetry. But in some ways that seems less representative of the actual forms of these works and more representative of how bookstores shelve anything that is not conventional prose in the poetry section. Yet still, I have been torn between whether to make this book an argument for poetry or not.
On the one hand, calling works poetry tosses them out of the radar of much academic discourse. As Carrie Noland notes, "As attention shifts from canonical texts and formalist methodologies to the contextualized study of more popular forms, poetry appears to be the genre whose traditional status within the humanities curriculum is most seriously threatened" (40). Anecdotally, I see this trend reflected in the courses taught in my university. There are few poetry courses and when poetry does appear it appears as a part of historically based survey classes. Courses that examine concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and culture in literature, if they teach any poetry at all, tend to say something after a long list of novels like "the reading for this course will be supplemented by some poems."

On the other hand, the works that I examine in this study are often written by writers that self-identify as poets. And that desire to identify as a poet is probably telling. These works, the ones that come after Stein, all have roots in the huge growth of various grassroots, non-university affiliated poetry scenes that develop in the United States after the 1950s. While some of these writers teach in the university (Andrews in political science at Fordham University; Mullen in English at the University of California, Los Angeles), their work is not rooted in the M.F.A./creative writing scene but rather in communities gathering outside of traditional institutions. My response in this study has been to more or less leave this argument behind as these writers have done in their own work. Yet I bring issues of genre up here because they do have some larger resonance. I realized this the other day when listening to a colleague talking about the death of poetry (she was referencing books like Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter) and student disinterest. Her conviction, even while it was said in lament, that poetry was irrelevant to the time pointed out to me how dramatically different poetry's role in the university is to its role outside of it. One of the more interesting sociological moments that genre studies has yet to examine is how the decline of poetry in the academy has been accompanied by the growth in attention, publication, and programming of poetry by non-university venues. Poetry in these non-university venues has become an unusually politicized genre. And as Maria Damon notes, "[t]hese forms, consciousnesses, and communities are not, however, mere acultural novelties but carry with them the traces and influences of many dissident or socially subordinated traditions as well as evolving new ones" ("Avant-Garde or Borderguard" 479). The issues and concerns of collectivity and critique that are dominant discussions in these various grassroots poetry scenes have greatly defined and influenced the writers of this study.

A recent talk by Grace Molisa at the University of Hawai`i Manoa made me think more about what is to be gained from poetry. Molisa, a writer from Vanuatu, spoke movingly on the role of poetry in a country of eighty islands with over one hundred languages (three national languages), and a population of 170,000. Her poetry, a poetry of memo, made me think a lot about poetry's role as information. One of Molisa's poems, for instance, is called "Democracy" and explains very clearly what democracy is using a stanzaic form. Molisa talked of how she began writing poetry in order to be able to get information out to isolated villages. Her work interests me because it is so divorced from the conventions of postcolonial poetry even while it is directly rooted in a postcolonial state. While I want to avoid genre essentialism, her attention to the sorts of work poetry can do in various contexts was one that I saw as useful for thinking about works of autonomy and poetry's unique role outside of the academy.

Finally, this book also is a defense of literature, of poetry, in an age of critique. When I sat down to write this study, I wanted to point to works that I found important pedagogically and personally, works that shifted conventions of thinking for the students I encountered and for myself. While literary criticism has done valuable work of critique, successfully investigating how literature can reify racism and sexism, it has less often explored the ways literature might avoid such damages. This book looks at works that concentrate on possibilities of response to various forms of oppression. These are works that are emblematic of the world's growing connectiveness, yet ones that do not see these connections as unifying or homogenous. They are works that negotiate between the dire worries of homogeneity and loss and the utopian hopes of diversity and invention.

The book develops these arguments through a series of chronologically ordered close readings. I begin with Stein's claim to write for everybody, with her use of fragmentation to encourage reader autonomy. Stein's work is an ideal place for any consideration of reading's politics and possibilities because it is so extreme, so extremely repetitive, so extremely fractured, and so extremely lengthy. In this chapter I begin by placing this much-noted extremity and multivalence of Stein's experimental works in an urban, polyglot context. And I conclude by looking at Stein's claims that she wrote for everybody.

In the second chapter I look at language writing in general and the work of Andrews and Hejinian more specifically. In this chapter I not only examine the already mentioned connective possibilities of Andrews's work, but also the investigation of privilege that often gets overlooked in discussions of experimental works. In this chapter, for instance, I examine how Hejinian uses identification in My Life to move her readers in, through, and out of her autobiographical "I." Hejinian's switch of autobiography from narcissistic and individualistic to the constructed nature of collective memory is a deliberate reinterpretation of the bourgeois history of the autobiography. The twist of My Life is how it points out that even the most narcissistic of genres, the most self-privileging, has possibilities for outward connection. Andrews's "Confidence Trick" extends the work of My Life into racial critique. The "I" in this work is not allowed to be generic. And whiteness is never allowed to be neutral in this poem. It is always mocked and exposed as connected to larger systems of power. The moments of reader connection in Andrews's work are, thus, also moments where readers are required to question their own affiliations.

In chapter three, I turn to the work of Harryette Mullen. Mullen's later works, and these are the ones I concentrate on, turn to puns, samplings, and other sorts of word play to examine and challenge overly limiting constructions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. As her work illustrates, the difficult and necessary work of challenging limiting subjectivities requires also that one challenge the strictures of grammar and rigorous narrative.
In the final chapter, I look at Cha's DICTEE. Cha talks about reading frequently in DICTEE. In her preferred model, reading involves not simply the ability to identify and assign meaning to certain works, but also the ability to enter into a creative and self-reflexive relation with them. Both readers and works matter. DICTEE is a complicated work. It is multilingual (it is mainly written in a nonstandard English and French); it is more collage than narrative; it is highly allusive; it often tricks and lies to its readers. My argument in this chapter is that Cha pursues and presents not simply a critique of colonization on the level of content (much of the book is about the colonization of Korea by Japan), but that she also writes her work so as to decolonize reading. Her work challenges the forms of reading that subtly remove literature from cultural concerns, from the world which produces and surrounds it. As political decolonization's intent is to dislodge dominant and externally imposed ideas and ideologies, so Cha wants to dislodge dominant and externally imposed methods of reading.

"CLEAR AS MUD, BUT MUD SETTLES"

My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear, perhaps that is the reason but really there is no reason except that the earth is round and that no one knows the limits of the universe that is the whole thing about men and women that is interesting.
--Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

The creativity of the reader grows as the institution that controlled it declines.
--Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

It has been a good, heady century for readers. In fact one of the sad ironies of contemporary life, is that while a new world order constantly asserts its might (the writing of this book was sandwiched between the Gulf War and the bombing of Serbia), there has been at the same time a vigilant, if often overlooked, tendency of art and culture that continually reacts against authoritarianism in the name of autonomy. I am not sure what to make of this. Some might argue that culture has become so irrelevant under global capitalism that its resistances are ignored. But I think one could just as easily argue that things could be much worse without cultural resistance and reclamation, without literature that presents a way out of the abyss.

In this context, some well-schooled in reader response and deconstruction might reply to my arguments that reading is always free, always impossible to pin down. Even literary criticism, one of the more slow to change genres, reflects this move to autonomy that defines twentieth century culture. After new criticism's intense respect for the work, literary theory celebrates reading in a series of quick changes that begin in the 1970s with deconstruction and continue to this day. Readers gain so much power that, by 1980, Stanley Fish asks Is There a Text In This Class? and answers no.

But it is worth noticing, as the language acquisition sections of Cha's DICTEE so poignantly suggest, that reading is also a learned and regulated act. Reading is usually taught in school so as to walk hand in hand with assimilation. And it is at its most oppressive when taught through principles of absolute meaning. Beginning reading exercises tend to emphasize meaning as unambiguous and singular; the word "duck" in the primer means the bird not the verb. Further, as a learned and regulated act, reading socializes readers not only into the process of translating symbol into word with a one to one directness but also into specific social relationships. Dick and Jane, to use the most cliched example of a primer, teach how to live the normalized lives of the nuclear family as much as they teach how to read. Further, much of what is read does not fully engage the resistant possibilities within reading and as a result tends to perpetuate reading's conventions.

So while one of the major lessons of poststructuralism has been that readers construct meanings and texts, these works that pursue reader autonomy point to how this construction does not take place on an entirely blank slate. Too many arguments about reading end with the mere observation that reading is variable and avoid sidestepping the responsibility for assessing the politics and dynamics of crossing itself. Readers can, after all, read variably only to find themselves choosing between two forms of containment. To ignore the formal characteristics of the work is to ignore one of the crucial ways works carry meaning. Further, such an approach reads all works as bland and apolitical.

Undeniably my attention to reading here draws heavily from deconstructive and reading response theory that occurred in the 1980s. I have learned a lot from the attention in these discussions to the more practical moments of reading. And from the attention to how reading is an act that is variable. But while reader-orientated theory has been of undeniable influence to both my work and my teaching, I have found its distrust of readers's potential for anarchic rebellion of limited applicability to the works I examine here. The fear of anarchy has led a number of critics, the very critics most concerned with resisting readerly restrictions, to conceive of readers as one of them, as literary critics who categorize and follow reading's conventions. Umberto Eco's "model reader," Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader," Michael Riffaterre's "super reader," Jonathan Culler's "ideal reader," and Stanley Fish's "community of readers" are all examples of this sort of model reader.

While the character of the model readers that these critics present often varies, and requires more attention than I dedicate here, Fish's turn to a community-oriented model of reading that limits individual response provides a succinct example of the potential repressive possibilities of such models. When he asks the question "is there a text in this class?" and answers no, there are only readers, since he also fears the anarchy that could happen when there are only readers, he proposes readers who will not misbehave. Fish's introduction to Is There a Text in this Class? presents him wrestling constantly with the question of a reader's potential anarchy (which he calls "subjectivity") and continually sidestepping the issue until he reconceives "the reader in such a way as to eliminate the category of 'the subjective' altogether"(10). Instead of seeing reading's difficult relation to subjectivity as a crucial part of reading's power, he establishes the kinder, gentler authority of a dominant community. Readers may create the work, but not individually, only through their input into this larger interpretive community. His model also assumes the members of this community to be critics. This community, as Elizabeth Meese notes, establishes "a gender-based literary tribalism, that comes into play as a means of control"(7). In contrast, the works of reader autonomy that I concentrate on here invert literary tribalism and insist on crossed interpretative moves and communities.

For the works I discuss here, I have found it useful to think of reading as anarchic. There is in these works a collective attention to the multiple, an attention to the diversity of response in the name of individual rights. David Weir points out in Anarchy and Culture that "anarchism succeeded culturally where it failed politically" (5). And the works that I discuss in this book are best explained with an anarchic frame. I am thinking here of reading as a form of self-governing that resembles Peter Kropotkin's territorial and functional decentralization. Stein, for instance, writes for anarchic individualism when she writes the word "one" one hundred times, like this "one and one and one . . .," so as to emphasize individuals within communities (Useful Knowledge 150-151). And Andrews riffs off of Stein to connect reading and this multiplicity of position: "We can take our well-developed attention to signs & our desire for their dishevelment & expose it to a social dialogue, to networks of meaning understood as thoroughly socialized, to questions about the making of the subject (Reading as Writing & Writing as Reading): the making of Americans-the making of me, myself, & I-of you, yourself, & us" (Paradise & Method 52). And Cha urges simply, "More. Others." (DICTEE 65). These one words sentences of Cha's with their content of pluralism yet a rejection of collective inclusion into the sentence's hierarchies well exemplifies much of what interests me about these works.

Often the criticism of these works of reader autonomy misreads them as individualistic. Again and again Stein's work, for instance, has been called nonsense, or private, or encoded, or presymbolic. Instead, I like to think of her work as using reading to encourage a sort of anarchy-not the sort the Sex Pistols called for where all the rules be abandoned in the name of chaos--but rather one where the work allows readers self-governance and autonomy, where the reading act is given as much authority as the authoring act. As Emma Goldman writes, "[i]ndividuality is not to be confused with the various ideas and concepts of Individualism; much less with that 'rugged individualism' which is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality" (112). These works value the individual meanings readers bring to works and abandon much of the authority of the author. They, like anarchism, work to have both individuality and community. And from them a new discursive economy emerges, one that does not subordinate readers to explicative functions.

For similar reasons, I have also found useful theories of reading that come out of anthropology's concern with cultural negotiations and that figure it as cooperative storytelling. This would include Paulo Friere's various pedagogies. And Michael Taussig's emphasis on reading as "excesses of interpretation" (x). And Smadar Lavie's attention to how the Mzeina are "able to transcend world politics by means of local poetics" (39). And Greg Sarris's attention to reading's relation to dialogues or conversations "that can open the intermingling of the multiple voices within and between people and the texts they encounter, enabling people to see and hear the ways various voices intersect and overlap, the ways they have been repressed or held down because of certain social and political circumstances, and the ways they can be talked about and explored" (5). And outside of anthropology, certainly Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, required undergraduate reading for any English major of my age, resonates here.

I should stress here, however, that I turn to these theories for their attention to reading, for their attention to how poetry and other forms of writing matter. Clearly the role that language writing has in the United States is not in any way the same sort of role Mzeini poetry or Pomo baskets or stories has to those cultures. But still, I have found these critics turn away from a work's "literariness" and towards a work's collective resonances and uses more useful for thinking about reading's connective moments. These theories have also helped me to understand the importance (pedagogically; personally) to a series of often overlooked works in the United States.

Mainly this book is an attempt to figure out my own story, to understand what happened when I was in high school and found Stein's work in an anthology of twentieth century writing and everything that I thought I knew about reading changed. While one reading of this moment would be assimilationist (Stein's work representing everything that the rural midwestern town I was growing up in was against), I have not been willing to dismiss this early moment that easily. So this book is, fourteen years later, a continuation of the paper I wrote my senior year in high school in which I attempted to figure out what it was that Tender Buttons meant.

 

Notes:

1. It has been argued that the emphasis that critics such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Robert B. Stepto have placed on Douglass's literacy has ignored with Valerie Smith calls "indirect, surreptitious assertions of power" in women's narratives ("Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Theory and Criticism" 488). Smith argues further that Douglass's narrative "by demonstrating that a slave can be a man in terms of all the qualities valued by his northern middle-class reader---physical power, perserverance, literacy-he lends credence to the patriarchal structure largely responsible for his oppression" (Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative 27). This is a valid critique of readings of Douglass that have emphasized the writerly product of his literacy over the reading act. But at the same time it might not be necessary to see Douglass as the bad guy. Douglass's narrative is wonderfully dual in its insistence on both the communal and the individual. Even in a narrative such as Douglass's which carries questions of complicity, one realizes reading is more communal than individual, more resistant that complicit than one finds in most reader response theory. Douglass's idea of reading's literacy is broad as he uses literary (The Columbia Orator, Whittier's poetry) as well as extraliterary (abandoned copies of Webster's Spelling Book, bread, the shipyard, the newspaper, conversations) resources to obtain the pathway to freedom. He figures reading as collective production and emphasizes it as an act that is dependent on interrelation of forms of knowledge. Reading, in this narrative, is thus a force that can be channeled for utopian resistance against predatory assimilation. But it is obvious at the same time, and Douglass's narrative points this out, that reading is not necessarily emancipatory.

2. While rewriting this introduction I read Samuel R. Delany's Time Square Red Times Square Blue. While Delany's subject matter is very different than mine (his is Times Square jerk off theaters), his theories of connection in this work guided rewrites. He writes, for instance, "Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will" (121).

3. See Martha C. Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.

4. All the writers I examine here are well schooled in theoretical concerns. Stein wrote several essayistic studies of literature (Narration and Lectures in America). Andrews is a noted essayist and political theorist. Hejinian has taught in the Poetics Program at the New College in San Francisco. Mullen is a critic and also teaches at UCLA. Cha edited an important early collection of essays on film (Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus). It might be fruitful at some point to examine the relationship between contemporary writing and literary theory not as indictment (it seems as if since the rise of MFA programs and their agenda of confessionalism, the theoretical interests of writers is suspect rather than indicative of engaged thinking about larger issues), but as evidence of the growing popular influence of literary theory.

5. Charles Bernstein notes similarly, "The university environment is not just nonpoetic, which would be unexceptional, but antipoetic. And this situation has remained constant as we move from literary studies to the more sociologically and psychoanalytically deterministic approaches to cultural studies" ("What's Art Got To Do With It" 29). For more on poetic cultures see Christopher Beach's Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution, James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (especially the introduction to this book), Maria Damon's "When the NuYoricans Came to Town: (Ex)Changing Poetics" and "Avant-Garde or Borderguard: (Latino) Identity in Poetry," Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to Native American Texts, Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred, José Saldívar's Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, and Susan Stewart's "The State of Cultural Theory and the Future of Literary Form." See also issues of Alcheringa and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics.

6. See, for instance, Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, and John Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture. Jameson's Postmodernism is an important exception to this argument. I discuss this more later.

7. An interesting contrast to reading primers is Gertrude Stein's First Reader and Three Plays. Stein's "first reader," as I briefly discuss later, concentrates on words that mean doubly.

8. De Certeau argues, "There remains the literary domain, its modalities and its typology (from Barthes to Riffaterre to Jauss), once again privileged by writing but highly specialized: 'writers' shift the 'joy of reading' in a direction where it is articulated on an art of writing and on a pleasure of re-reading. In that domain, however, whether before or after Barthes, deviations and creativities are narrated that play with the expectations, tricks, and normativities of the 'work read'; there theoretical models that can account for it are already elaborated. In spite of all this, the story of man's travels through his own texts remains in large measure unknown" (170). See also Jane Tompkin's collection Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post Structuralism and Robert C. Holub's Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction.

9. I mention this because I feel that at times the relation that gets made between experimental poetry and more indigenous and/or communal, cultural poetry risks being oversimplistic in its desire to suggest alliance. Various sorts of ethnopoetics, for instance, have had a tendency to point to similar sorts of formal dissonance between these two types of poetry and yet to not given much attention to how these works come out of dramatically different contexts, political desires, and cultural resonances. Further, this alliance has tended to be a one way street (the "dialogue" here seems to happen more within experimental poetry communities, rather than across the poetries themselves). An important exception here is the recent editing work done by Mark Nowak in his journal XCP.