Experiment with Textual Materiality: Page, Author, and Medium in the Works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone, and Eduardo Kac

Books' new forms and distribution channels have radically changed how we envision writing and reading, allowing us to see more clearly the textual elements that we tend to take for granted—how books exist in the world, how they are authored, framed, presented, produced, and packaged. As part of these textual developments, numerous experimental works have played with signifying techniques and with textual formats—narrative and plot structures, voice, syntax, print, and orthography—inviting readers to reconsider the ways in which they envision and relate to textuality. Other works have placed materiality at the forefront of the experiment. Many of the authors who participate in this literary research have manipulated the stability of the page, the notion of authorship, and the fictional and poetic medium. In this article, I investigate the configuration of the page, the source and distribution of fiction, and the medium of delivery of the work in order to add an interpretive layer to the current frameworks that guide our understanding of experimental literature. More specifically, in the works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone, and Eduardo Kac, the physical realities leading to material and embodied reading practices allow readers to engage in an affirmative mode of experimental politics. What emerges out of these experiments with the physical qualities of literature is a mode of creation that does not provoke a mere momentary evasion of dominant ideology but fosters instead a political practice through its material existence.