Edited Works
About the Author:
Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was one of the most significant fiction writers of recent generations. Federman emigrated to the US in 1947 following the deaths of his mother, father, and two sisters in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. His early experiences in the US included being a American paratrooper in Korea, a saxophone player in Detroit, and a dishwasher and student in Columbia University, before earning a PhD at UCLA and becoming one of the first American critical promoters of the work of Samuel Beckett. Federman taught literature and creative writing at SUNY-Buffalo for 35 years. His numerous experience, exploits, and linguistic inventions have become the basis for nearly than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Swahili. Federman has also been the recipient of numerous awards in the US and abroad, including the American Book Award for Smiles on Washington Square. An important theorist of contemporary writing, Federman always insisted on the integration and inseparability of memory and imagination, fact and fiction. ”I have to still believe,” he once said in an interview, ”as I often do, that one of these days around a street corner I’m going to meet my sisters.”
About the Editors:
Robert Archambeau is co-director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books and a professor of English at Lake Forest College.
Davis Schneiderman is co-director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books and a professor of English at Lake Forest College.
Steve Tomasula is the founder of &NOW and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.
This collection is the first to address both historical and contemporary works that employ the ritual of the cadavre exquis. It offers a unique overview of the efforts of scholars and artists to articulate new notions of crossing temporal and spatial boundaries and to experience in a new way the body’s mutability through visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic frames. Bringing together diverse writers from across disciplinary boundaries, this volume continues the cultural and methodological innovations that have unfolded since the first days of the ‘Exquisite Corpse.’
About the Editors:
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren is an associate professor of performance studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and author of Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theater.
Davis Schneiderman is chair of the American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College. He is the author of Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader.
Tom Denlinger is an adjunct professor in the Department of Art Media and Design at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of Territorial by Design.
Contributors: Tom Denlinger, Don Dingledine, Ray Ellenwood, Elizabeth Finch, Ken Friedman, Oliver Harris, Allen Hibbard, Kimberly Jannarone, Michael Joyce, Anne M. Kern, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Susan Laxton, Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, Craig Saper, Ingrid Schaffner, and Davis Schneiderman.
This corpse is very living – and here, explored from many vantage points, performative, theoretical, art historical, and experiential. The variety of writing is as wide-ranging as the topic in all its excitement of exchange.
Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on ‘reality’; violence; magic and mysticism; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.
About the Editors
Philip Walsh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University.
Schneiderman and Walsh’s new collection should mark the beginning of a new and wider view of the contemporary implications of Burroughs’s thought. This collection is retaking the universe of Burroughsian interpretation-starting now.
‘Retaking the Universe’ is the first serious and well-conceived study of [Burroughs’s] global influence.
More than any other writer of the last fifty years, William Burroughs cracked the code of the hyperreal, ultra-commodified society of control, and charted out possible lines of escape. These essays testify to the continuing relevance of Burroughs’s words and projects in the twenty-first century.