A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from
Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its
limits.
In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and
poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be
understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set
of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most
basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which
breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically
considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby
Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a
fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or
an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United
States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the
production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the
language of the sciences.
Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the
epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of
knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge
practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic
virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire
demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not
do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic
virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash,
objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with
population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and
anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may
the literary forms through which they manifest.
Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental
literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of
twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a
group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon
what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were
simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was
an intellectual and a text that was experimental.
