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American Paraliterature examines the generative encounters of post-1968 French theory with the postwar American avant-garde. The book begins with an account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference that was organized by Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University. The conference was an attempt to directly connect the American avant-garde with French theory. At the event, John Cage shared the stage with Deleuze and Foucault introduced William S. Burroughs. This schizo-connection presents a way to read the experimental methods of the American avant-garde (Burroughs, Cage, and Kathy Acker), and how their writing creates a counterprogram to the power that Foucault and Deleuze started to articulate in the 1970s.
“‘There’s a familiar story about the arrival of poststructuralist theory in U.S. universities with Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan presenting papers at a conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966. Another event almost a decade later, the Schizo-Culture Conference at Columbia in 1975, attended by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, John Cage, and William Burroughs, and its aftershocks, felt by the likes of Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, and others, along with the former is the subject of this invaluable book. Stricklin traces the ways Schizo-Culture blew the doors off humanism, transforming contemporary literature and culture through an “American rhizome” far weirder and more punk than the influences of the so-called structuralist controversy.” —Dr. Aaron Jaffe, Frances Cushing Ervin Professor, Florida State University, US
Introduction – November 1975: A Schizo Report; Chapter I – “I Have Nothing to Say”; Chapter II – “Storming the Reality Studio” ; Chapter III – “Culture Stinks” ; Conclusion – “1984: A Postscript on the Paracommons”