ENG 5530, “Language Writing and Beyond,” has now passed the halfway mark. Organizing the vast amount of material is one thing, but the challenge of teaching Language writing at this historical date—50 years after the first emergent activity—involves rethinking its (non)narrative, its “author function”, its categories, its forms, its values, its politics, what is revealed and concealed, and what comes next. To summarize this pedagogical work of framing, I devised a midterm exam that students understood was, to begin with, an assemblage of the work done so far. Here I want to make this intellectual labor, in the context of an advanced upper division “Topics” course at Wayne State University, available to the field. I believe strongly a revision is necessary and in the works, and that the “usual” account has long since outlived its opening rationale for our work of literary production and reception, and that much needs to be recovered. What emerges, decisively, is that Language writing was in no sense a “period style,” a combine of, say, open form plus material textuality after the New Americans or collage-driven abstraction as a “turn to language” with the New York School—or really, any of a dozen major influences, from modernism and Conceptual Art and to the politics and artist spaces of the 70s. … More
