American Paraliterature examines the generative encounters of post-1968 French theory with the postwar American avant-garde. The book begins with an account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference that was organized by Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University. The conference was an attempt to directly connect the American avant-garde with French theory. At the event, John Cage shared the stage with Deleuze and Foucault introduced William S. Burroughs. This schizo-connection presents a way to read the experimental methods of the American avant-garde (Burroughs, Cage, and Kathy Acker), and how their writing creates a counterprogram to the power that Foucault and Deleuze started to articulate in the 1970s.

A critical account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference, which Michel Foucault called “the last countercultural event of the 1960s,” and its direct and indirect connection to American experimental literature.

The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication. Working within an expanded concept of modernism, Flusser presciently noted the power inherent in algorithmic information apparatuses to reshape our fundamental conceptions of culture and history. In an increasingly technological world, Flusser's form of experimental theory-fiction pits philosophy against cybernetics as it forces the category of “the human” to confront the inhuman world of animals and machines. The contributors to Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism engage with the multiplicity of Flusser's thought as they provide a general analysis of his work, engage in comparative readings with other philosophers, and offer expanded conceptualizations of modernism. The final section of the volume includes an extended glossary clarifying the playful terminology used by Flusser, which will be a valuable resource for experts and students alike.

In addition to contributing significantly to the growing field of Burroughs scholarship, Burroughs Unbound also directly engages with the growing fields of textual studies, archival research, and genetic criticism, asking crucial questions thereby about the nature of archives and their relationship to a writer's work. These questions about the archive concern not only the literary medium. In the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers, sound technicians, and musicians, who helped re-contextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author's work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who critiqued drug laws, sexual practice, censorship, and what we today call a society of control. More broadly, his work continues to challenge our common assumptions about language, authorship, textual stability, and the archive in its broadest definition.

"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge--issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)--strikes some critics as scandalous, others as provocative and productive. The argument is directed against both sides of the current debates in literary theory, criticizing theoretical "objectivists" like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on the one hand, and proponents of indeterminacy like Paul de Man on the other. The attack is not just on a particular way of doing theory but on the entire project of literary theory. The challenge is not only to a way of thinking and writing but to a way of making a living. The resulting controversy has drawn so much attention among literary critics that it has been collected in a single volume so that the debate can be followed from start to finish. This collection includes the essay "Against Theory," seven responses to it, and a rejoinder by Knapp and Michaels (originally published in Critical Inquiry 9:4); in addition, there are two new statements plus a final reply by Knapp and Michaels. The debate chronicled in this volume raises the most fundamental issues in the theory of meaning and the practice of interpretation. Are Knapp and Michaels confronting literary theory with a new "pragmatic" form of theory? Or are they (as some of their respondents suggest) arguing for a new form of nihilism? "If it is a nihilism," writes editor W. J. T. Mitchell, "it is one that demands an answer, not easy polemical dismissal, one that calls for theory to clarify its claims, not to mystify them and the easy assurance of intellectual fashion and institutional authority." It is the intention of Against Theory to aid in that clarification.

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument. The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse. The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education.