Laying Bare the Device

What do experiential poet Bruce Andrews and former Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly have in common? On the surface, almost nothing—the former is a highly regarded, retired academic and the latter a disgraced TV host and conservative partisan. For a brief four minutes in 2006, however, the two met and discussed on national television the nature of politics and higher education, with predictable obtuseness on the part of O’Reilly. Nothing was concluded or conceded, and arguably nothing was learned. Yet both did portend a fundamental change to the operation of American political life. O’Reilly’s attempt was far more public (and destructive), but Andrews’s political project has remained confined to a small contingent of scholars. This article reexamines Andrews’s claim that the only effective means of political resistance can come from an experimental poetic practice that challenges the ideology of American individualism at the heart of contemporary sense making. The author argues that the limitations of this political project are instructive and relevant beyond the confines of a scholarly interest in poetry, which are revealed through readings of Harryette Mullen.

Extrapolating Terminology: The Carnivalesque Practice of Language Writing In the Grotesque Body of I Don’t Have Any Paper

There is a similarity between the rhetorical strategies of Language Writing and the rhetorical strategies attributed to carnivalesque texts by Mikhail Bakhtin. However, the aesthetic differences between standard uses of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism may, at first, obfuscate these similarities in rhetorical strategy. While the aesthetic of these two forms of writing is certainly not identical, there are enough allegorically and rhetorically parallel elements to state that a form of the carnivalesque and grotesque is at work in Language Writing. To prove as much I will summarize Mikhail Bakhtin’s articulation of carnival and grotesque realism and then draw lines of similarity between that articulation and the strategies of Language Writing expressed by Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery. In the process I will bolster my argument with reference to textual examples, taken from Bruce Andrews I Don’t Have Any Paper, which exemplify these parallels in operation.