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

"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."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Ernstmeyer, Phillip W

Contributors dc:contributor

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

• 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

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Phillip Ernstmeyer

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90708