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Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 38, Number 1, Fall 2014
- pp. 166-182
- 10.2979/jmodelite.38.1.166
- Article
- Additional Information
More than being his life’s work, Larry Eigner’s oeuvre is genuinely life-like — a zoetic formation. His poetry, experimental prose, and autobiographical writings expanded John Dewey’s biological theory of art, bringing it into a post-World War II context in which machinic and artificial structures were increasingly understood to be capable of self-modulating, lively behavior. Eigner’s provisional poetics — his refusal to give his texts a final, delineable format — offers an aesthetic counterpart to twentieth-century philosophical and scientific attempts to conceptualize (and construct) live bodies as open-ended, shifting organizations rather than organic wholes.