Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity

by Juliana Spahr

Experimental texts empower the reader by encouraging self-governing approaches to reading and by placing the reader on equal footing with the author. Everybody's Autonomy is about reading and identity.
 
Contemporary avant garde writing has often been overlooked by those who study literature and identity. Such writing has been perceived as unrelated, as disrespectful of subjectivity. But Everybody's Autonomy instead locates within avant garde literature models of identity that are communal, connective, and racially concerned. Everybody's Autonomy , as it tackles literary criticism's central question of what sort of selves do works create, looks at works that encourage connection, works that present and engage with large, public worlds that are in turn shared with readers. With this intent, it aligns the iconoclastic work of Gertrude Stein with foreign, immigrant Englishes and their accompanying subjectivities. It examines the critique of white individualism and privilege in the work of language writers Lyn Hejinian and Bruce Andrews. It looks at how Harryette Mullen mixes language writing's open text with the distinctivesness of African-American culture to propose a communal, yet still racially conscious identity. And it examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's use of broken English and French to unsettle readers' fluencies and assimilating comprehensions, to decolonize reading. Such works, the book argues, well represent and expand changing notions of the public, of everybody. 

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2001

About the author

Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.

Both Spahr's critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr's commitment to fostering a "value of reading" as a communal, democratic, open process. Her work therefore "distinguishes itself because she writes poems for which her critical work calls." In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spahr is clear, concise and thoughtful in a way that one does not see much in contemporary criticism. Her attention to fragmentation, multiplicities, structural and formal developments of language, a wide array of theory from post-structural, post-colonial, and Marxist, enable this book to nestle snugly into the gaps left vacant between these different perspectives without denying any of them outright. She's able to clearly critique Jameson's "Postmodernism" in a way that strongly rocks a few of the premises of his book while also continuing to acknowledge its significance regardless. And that in a way--through examining Stein, Hejinian, Andrews, Mullen, and Cha--is what makes Spahr's work so strong; she never goes as far as to dismiss previous critiques of these poetic works, but she uses the undeveloped, or over/underdeveloped, areas of previous critiques to illuminate the way that language as capital, as imperialist-homogeneity, is both a blinding light and also the darkest of eclipses. That the way a poetics of repetition, fracture, poly-lingual, culture conscious, and jagged confrontational, establishes a community of readers through discontinuity; that a language or poetics of discontinuity does not necessarily mandate a schizophrenic reader, but enables both a schizophrenic reader and a reader brought to awareness of the ideology behind the connections and disconnections of word, as language, action, real world communal meaning.

[Marije de Wit · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘[Stein] does not give in to those policing and conservative worries about creating a Tower of Babel. Instead, she acknowledges that there will always be people who have trouble understanding each other and that it is the role of literature to demonstrate tolerance and respect for those moments. And her work provides readers with the tools to handle such situations by writing a tolerant literature of polylingual grammar that makes room for less smooth communication, for a slower and different discourse of possibility.’

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much more engaged and comprehensive book than the others I've recently read on the process of reading:
"Reading has a complex social role. It is one of the most important ways human beings take in knowledge, learn,
and go about the business of what Stein could call, with her fondness for gerunds, being human. Without a reading that pursues ideals,
all this is at risk. Without pursuing reading's renewal, we hazard no longer thinking of ourselves as doers or undoers, as shifters of patterns of thought."

[Keleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear and unassuming brilliance from a woman I will hopefully have the opportunity to work with at Mills over the next 2 years. Hurrah!

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learn more about Juliana Spahr in an interview for Words With Writers: http://wordswithwriters.com/2010/11/2...