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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
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Powers of Possibility - Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Paperback)
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Powers of Possibility - Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Paperback)
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In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukacs
discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the
more pressing for literary writers to present 'concrete
potentialities' of individual character in novel ways. Powers of
Possibility explores how American experimental writers since the
1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with
specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a
range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including:
Allen Ginsberg's anti-Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the
Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn
Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines
how relations of character and social power were widely discussed
in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated
the 'revolutionary potential' of African Americans, while advances
in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of
'human potential' in space colonies. In considering how the
literary writers engage with such debates, Alex Houen also shows
how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of
'potential': 'possible as opposed to actual'; 'a quantity of
force'; a 'capacity' or 'faculty'; and 'potency'. Such an approach
can be characterised as a literary 'potentialism' that turns
literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form)
into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient
the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a
literary movement, Houen emphasises, so much as a novel concept of
literary practice-a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative
to notions of 'postmodernism' and the 'postmodern avant-garde'.
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