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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mark Byers
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Routledge, 2021.
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‘Language’ writing is frequently understood as a response to the collapse of the New Left and the entrenchment of post-Fordist economics in the 1970s. In this essay, I propose a third key context for this loosely-defined movement: the arrival of electronic and digital word-processing systems in the American workplace and, increasingly, the middle-class American home. Foregrounding contemporary accounts of these systems, I suggest that the textual politics of ‘Language’ writing, as well as its bibliographical experiments (or ‘paperworks’), constituted a variety of media critique; questioning and contesting a shift towards textual automation and fluidity which had become crucial to the American service and information sectors. Drawing special attention to the issue of screen textuality, the essay examines key works by Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian in the period 1976–83 in the light of these media transitions, arguing for a media historical account of the movement, perhaps the last analogue avant-garde.
Author(s): Byers M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Textual Practice
Year: 2021
Volume: 35
Issue: 2
Pages: 333-352
Online publication date: 20/01/2021
Acceptance date: 28/05/2019
Date deposited: 18/07/2019
ISSN (print): 0950-236X
ISSN (electronic): 1470-1308
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2020.1857827
DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1857827
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