Reading consequences: Ethics, belief and the reader in America's postwar avant-garde

This dissertation's primary concern is the belief that how we read a text carries that text's ethical burden. How a reader understands a word is always an act of definition, a definition that may be judged by the consequences of that particular definitions word use. Such judgments depend on a recognition that a word means something particular, and that such meanings must engage universal belief to return to particular circumstances. This language use is best illustrated by “reader-centered writing,” a category that allows for a larger consideration of postwar experimental writing while engaging L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing in particular. To demonstrate what reader-centered writing is specifically, Chapter One, “Democratic Poetics,” uses Ronald Johnson's long poem ARK to examine the ways postwar American literature incorporates the reader in the production of meaning.; Of the poetry chapters, Chapter Two, “Reading Unreadability,” argues that although reader-centered texts risk unreadability because of their disruptive nature, it is textual difficulty that recognizes that meaning is always multiple, and beyond singular, dominant cultural definitions of value. Chapter Three, “Writing the Republic,” extends the question of unreadability to Robert Grenier's Sentences and Lyn Hejinian's My Life to account for the way L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing allows for political reconstitution of the social body through the renegotiation of the reading subject. The final chapter, “Romancing the AvantGarde,” closes this project by turning to Bruce Andrews's long poem Lip Service to argue that because Andrews creates his poem as a response to Dante's Paradiso, rather than overthrowing the Paradiso 's vision of Creation, Lip Service asks us to reconsider the very structure of belief itself.; The two fiction chapters, Chapter Four, “Determined to Know Garbage,” and Chapter Five, “Prurient Ethics,” discuss DeLillo's Underworld and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow respectively. The former argues that DeLillo uses fragmentation to create opportunities for a reader to experience the sublime and transcend disempowering postmodern knowledge. The latter draws the project together by exploring the possibility that the novel's narrative practice leads to an understanding of subjectivity based on an ethics of interpersonal accountability rather than an individualist “rights-based” morality.