My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

W HAT'S ART GOT TO DOW I T HIT? 49
sans enthralled with our subjects. Yet this very professionalism can preclude
perspective on our own absorption in the fictions of critical distance.
The problem with the normalizing critical writing practices of the humanities
is not that they are too theoretical but that they are not theoretical
enough-they fail to theorize themselves or to keep pace with their own
theories.
For models for the new writing the age demands, North American
literary and cultural critics, essayists, and historians have turned to the
radical literary arts of this century producing a startling range of prose
forms, including (to mention just those from the last few years) the dialogues
of Jerome McGann; the use of typographic and visual elements
as integral to both the critical analysis and mode of argument in Trinh
T. Minh-ha's Woman, Native, Other, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Avital Ronell's
The Telephone Book, and Johanna Drucker's Simulant Portrait, the insistence on
the autobiographical in the recent talk essays of David Antin, Samuel R.
Delany's Motion of Light in Water, and Nancy Miller's Getting Personal; the politically
and performatively charged essays of Kofi Natambu; the pataphysically
playful, detail-centered 16th and 17th century textual criticism
of Randall McLeod; the new historiography of Susan Howe's The Birthmark:
Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History; the improvisatory
prose of Amiri Baraka; the essays-in-film of Yvonne Rainier and Guy Debord;
the exuberant championing of nonstandard poetries as part of a context
of visual and popular culture in Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery
and Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment, Poetic License, and Radical Artifice;
the reworking of biography and autobiography as oral history in QUincy
Troupe's rethinking of the vernacular in Miles: The Autobigraphy and Peter
Brazeau's earlier book on Stevens, Parts of a World; Dennis Tedlock's continuing
explorations of oral and performative modes of interpretation and
translation; Larry McCaffery's championing of the interview and other
metafictional critical forms; the glorious speculative flights of Nick Piombino
in Boundary of Blur or Steve McCaffery in North of Intention and of Mc­
Caffery and bp Nichol in Rational Geomancy and in Christopher Dewdney's
natural history as sci-fi; the intertwining of poetry and philosophy in Linda
Reinfeld's Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue; the hypertextual investigations
of Michael Joyce and Jay Boltner and the electronic format of the e-mail
magazines Postmodern Culture and Rif/t, and such marvelous reworkings of
the essay form as Larry Eigner's Areas/Lights/Heights, Nathaniel Mackey's
Bedouin Hornbook, Madeline Gins's Helen Keller or Arakawa, James Sherry's Our
Nuclear Heritage, Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory, and Leslie Scalapino's How
Phenomena Appear to Unfold and Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking
Place.
No doubt this collapses conventional distinctions among scholarly,