Stephen Schryer
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603677
- eISBN:
- 9781503606081
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603677.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an ...
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Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an antiformalist art that privileged process over product, rejecting literary conventions that separated authors from their audiences. This aesthetic was part of a broader trend toward participatory professionalism: an emerging model of expert work that challenged boundaries between professionals and clients. During the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration promoted this model through the Community Action Program, which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” by lower-class clients. Not coincidentally, many writers, especially cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), established institutions that were funded by this program. Participatory professionalism, however, hinged on a concept of poverty that was the paradigm’s undoing. Postwar social scientists developed a binary model of class, which insisted that the poor inhabit a culture of poverty at odds with middle-class norms. This theory resonated with process artists’ depictions of poverty as an alternative, present-oriented worldview that disrupted traditional literary conventions. This notion of cultural difference at once enabled and frustrated process art, and it lent itself to political programs aimed at dismantling the welfare state. With in-depth readings of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Chute, Maximum Feasible Participation shows how mid-twentieth-century welfare politics transformed American writers’ understanding of audience and literary form.Less
Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an antiformalist art that privileged process over product, rejecting literary conventions that separated authors from their audiences. This aesthetic was part of a broader trend toward participatory professionalism: an emerging model of expert work that challenged boundaries between professionals and clients. During the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration promoted this model through the Community Action Program, which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” by lower-class clients. Not coincidentally, many writers, especially cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), established institutions that were funded by this program. Participatory professionalism, however, hinged on a concept of poverty that was the paradigm’s undoing. Postwar social scientists developed a binary model of class, which insisted that the poor inhabit a culture of poverty at odds with middle-class norms. This theory resonated with process artists’ depictions of poverty as an alternative, present-oriented worldview that disrupted traditional literary conventions. This notion of cultural difference at once enabled and frustrated process art, and it lent itself to political programs aimed at dismantling the welfare state. With in-depth readings of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Chute, Maximum Feasible Participation shows how mid-twentieth-century welfare politics transformed American writers’ understanding of audience and literary form.
Margaret Ronda
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603141
- eISBN:
- 9781503604896
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603141.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End discusses postwar poetry as an essential archive of ecological thinking in the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of rapid and unprecedented change to ...
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Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End discusses postwar poetry as an essential archive of ecological thinking in the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of rapid and unprecedented change to various planetary systems. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, this book highlights the forms and themes of poetry as it imaginatively engages with various aspects of ecological crisis across this period. This book examines how works by poets including Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder, and Juliana Spahr offer representations of remainders, from obsolescent goods to waste products and toxic matter, that explore the lingering consequences of productive relations. In their attention to these material forms, these poems explore unresolvable affects and sensations of living on amidst ecological calamity. This book’s method of reading for remainders redirects attention from postwar historical frameworks that stress social progress and economic development toward an emphasis on their socioecological effects, developing an ecomaterialist approach that draws on the critical historiography of natural history developed by Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno. This approach also provides a distinctive account of the investments of postwar American poetry. Through its figurations of materials and activities cast adrift by capitalist modernization, poetry across this period develops a powerful ethos of untimeliness. Remainders argues that this ethos reflects on poetry’s own increasingly marginal status as a cultural form.Less
Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End discusses postwar poetry as an essential archive of ecological thinking in the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of rapid and unprecedented change to various planetary systems. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, this book highlights the forms and themes of poetry as it imaginatively engages with various aspects of ecological crisis across this period. This book examines how works by poets including Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder, and Juliana Spahr offer representations of remainders, from obsolescent goods to waste products and toxic matter, that explore the lingering consequences of productive relations. In their attention to these material forms, these poems explore unresolvable affects and sensations of living on amidst ecological calamity. This book’s method of reading for remainders redirects attention from postwar historical frameworks that stress social progress and economic development toward an emphasis on their socioecological effects, developing an ecomaterialist approach that draws on the critical historiography of natural history developed by Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno. This approach also provides a distinctive account of the investments of postwar American poetry. Through its figurations of materials and activities cast adrift by capitalist modernization, poetry across this period develops a powerful ethos of untimeliness. Remainders argues that this ethos reflects on poetry’s own increasingly marginal status as a cultural form.
Accident Society
Across Meridians
An Age of Melodrama
Alchemical Mercury
Ambiguous Bodies
Anonymous Life
Barbarism and Its Discontents
Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity
Better Left Unsaid
