Abstract

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.

pdf

Share