Everybody’s Autonomy : Connective Reading and Collective Identity

Experimental texts empower the reader by encouraging self-governing approaches to reading & by placing the reader on equal footing with the author. Everybody's Autonomy is about reading & identity.   
 
Contemporary avant garde writing has often been overlooked by those who study literature & 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, & 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 & 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 & their accompanying subjectivities. It examines the critique of white individualism & privilege in the work of language writers Lyn Hejinian & 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 & French to unsettle readers' fluencies & assimilating comprehensions, to decolonize reading. Such works, the book argues, well represent & expand changing notions of the public, of everybody.