Literature’s Elsewheres

An examination of a series of diverse, radical, and experimental international works from the 1950s to the present. What is a literary work? In Literatures Elsewheres , Annette Gilbert tackles this question by deploying an extended concept of literature, examining a series of diverse, radical, experimental works from the 1950s to the present that occupy the liminal zone between art and literature. These worksby American Artist, Allison Parrish, Natalie Czech, Stephanie Syjuco, Fiona Banner, Elfriede Jelinek, Dan Graham, Robert Barry, George Brecht, and othersrepresent a pluralized literary practice that imagines a different literature emerging from its elsewheres. Investigating a works coming into beingits transition from text to work as a social object and pragmatic category of literary communicationGilbert probes the assumptions and foundations that underpin literature, including the ideologies and power structures that prop it up. She offers a snapshot from a period of recent literary and art history when such central concepts as originality and authorship were questioned and experimental literary practices ranged from concrete poetry and Oulipo to conceptual writing and appropriation literature. She examines works that are dematerialized, site-specific, unique copies of other works, and institutional critiques. Considering the inequalities, exclusions, and privileges inscribed in literature, she documents the power of experimental literature to attack these norms and challenges the fields canonical geographic boundaries by examining artists with roots in North and South America, East Asia, and Western and Eastern Europe. The cross-pollination of literary and art criticism enriches both fields. With Literatures Elsewheres , Gilbert explores what art cant see about the literary and what literature has overlooked in the arts.