Description: Taking her cue from W. E. B. Du Bois, Juliana Spahr explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? As her sobering study affirms, aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.
Brief description: Juliana Spahr is Professor of English at Mills College. She is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Winter the Wolf Came, Well Then There Now, and Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award. She is also the editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century and received the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Review Quotes: This book is thrilling. Spahr develops a truly original, even clarion, account of the relationship of social movements, avant-garde and politically charged writing, and the foreign policy arm of the United States. A great deal of the power of Du Bois's Telegram has to do with the way it makes totally unexpected connections among separate discourses, and makes the connections seem necessary and obvious, at a stroke. It is common to praise a book for being potentially field-changing; this book suggests the possibility of changing several fields.--Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University