The Force of What’s Possible

A dynamic collection of essays addressing the question of accessibility in experimental writing 

Essay

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Category:

Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde

Additional information

Weight 1.3 lbs
Dimensions 6 × .9 × 9 in

Is there any avant-garde? What’s at stake when 100 writers think through issues of accessibility and audience? This is a book comprised of answers—to these questions and their offspring—as various and contradictory as its contributors, ranging from Eileen Myles, Lyn Hejinian, and Joyelle McSweeney to Blake Butler, Jenny Boully, and Rikki Ducornet, among dozens of others. The results here provide discrepant engagements on the most pressing questions of the literary, the political, and the force of what’s possible for writers in the 21st Century.

Details
ISBN: 9781937658274
paperback, 400 pages, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: 2014
Reviews

The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde dwells in this essential intertwinement by asking about the possibilities of the literary avant-garde. The book, edited by Lily Hoang and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, collects more than 90 short pieces from living experimental writers. The editors aim to re-awaken the avant-garde by interrogating it. “I am interested in expanding the discourse,” writes Wilkinson in the introduction, “finding new modes of thinking through what writers do, and trying to interrogate the assumptions about the practices of writing.”

And the book demands further reading, for it answers its questions mostly with more questions. If, as I’ve suggested, we can understand the avant-garde’s vitality as coincident with deep, original, and productive inquiry, then The Force of What’s Possible suggests that the 21st century avant-garde is alive and rich with possibility.

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