Abstract for MMLA 2006 panel on "The Politics of Literary Criticism"

What Is Anarchist Literary Criticism?

    The recent revival of academic interest in the anarchist tradition has drawn new attention to a.) the influence of the anarchist movement on avant-garde modernisms (e.g., Pound's poetry, Picasso's collages) and b.) the way that the figure of "the anarchist" functions in certain narratives (e.g., Conrad's The Secret Agent, Norris' The Octopus).  However, this discussion has all but entirely omitted any consideration of the possible contributions of anarchism to literary criticism.  From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Du Principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale, 1865) to David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2002), anarchists have elaborated a distinct body of theory concerning literary meaning and critical methodology.  This presentation will outline some of this theoretical and critical corpus, comparing and contrasting it with varieties of feminist, marxist, and poststructuralist literary criticism.