The Labor of the Avant-Garde

While literary critics have explored the politics of labor in pre-war modernist literature, the post-45 avant-garde has continued to be framed as a depoliticized repetition of previous avant-garde styles. Examining American avant-garde literature in its relation to the political and economic shifts from the 1960s through the late 1980s, my dissertation corrects this narrative to show that labor and labor politics were central categories in post-war experimental poetry and fiction. I argue that writers as disparate as Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, and Susan Howe reworked disjunctive modernist forms to cognitively map emergent economic tendencies in the US. Parataxis, collage, surrealist imagery, aleatory compositional methods, non-linear plotting, and metafictional narrative conceits all constitute the stylistic techniques of an avant-garde engaged in an extended dialogue about work and the politics of work. The canon of experimental literature functioned as a counter-discourse that contested and reshaped discourses of labor by considering it alongside categories of race, gender, and sexuality. By using labor as an entry point into the avant-garde, my dissertation reconsiders the post-war literary canon, revealing an avant-garde that includes writers working across modes and genres. The adaptation of experimental techniques in genre writing turned the avant-garde into a popular literary mode. My dissertation particularly focuses on science fiction (SF), where the adaptation of experimental style played a crucial role in the development of the genre. Beginning with the 1960s British and American New Wave movement, SF writers turned to the experimental novel--often by way of modernist poetics--as a way to challenge the reified form of mainstream science fiction novels. I argue that this critique of the novel also functioned as a covert critique of the labor practices of the literary market place that guided the production of genre fiction. In this way, I contest traditional accounts that see post-war and contemporary experimental literature as increasingly marginal and self-reflective by tracking the avant-garde's concern with depicting quotidian work, and representing themselves as workers, to critique institutions of intellectual and artistic production.