Everybody's Autonomy ─ Connective Reading and Collective Identity

Everybody's Autonomy is about reading and identity.
Contemporary avant garde writing has often been overlooked by those who study
literature and identity. Such writing has been perceived as unrelated, as
disrespectful of subjectivity. But Everybody's Autonomy instead
locates within avant garde literature models of identity that are communal,
connective, and racially concerned. Everybody's Autonomy, as it tackles
literary criticism's central question of what sort of selves do works create, looks
at works that encourage connection, works that present and engage with large, public
worlds that are in turn shared with readers. With this intent, it aligns the iconoclastic
work of Gertrude Stein with foreign, immigrant Englishes and their accompanying
subjectivities. It examines the critique of white individualism and privilege in
the work of language writers Lyn Hejinian and Bruce Andrews. It looks at how Harryette
Mullen mixes language writing's open text with the distinctivesness of African-American
culture to propose a communal, yet still racially conscious identity. And it examines
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's use of broken English and French to unsettle readers' fluencies
and assimilating comprehensions, to decolonize reading. Such works, the book argues,
well represent and expand changing notions of the public, of everybody.

Juliana Spahr is Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She edits the journal Chain with Jena Osman.

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