Crowd Control

Claire Grossman is an assistant professor of English at Occidental College. She has written for Cultural Critique and (with Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young) American Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to the Essay, and Public Books.Juliana Spahr is Frederick A. Rice Professor at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her most recent book of poems is Ars Poeticas (2025) and her most recent book of scholarship is Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (2018).Stephanie Young directs the creative writing program at Mills College at Northeastern University and is a member of the Krupskaya Books editorial collective. Her books of poetry and prose include Pet Sounds (2019), which received a Lambda Literary Award.

Richly historicized yet immediate in its social and cultural claims, Crowd Control offers a brilliant diagnostic of the hypocrisies, ambivalences, and evasions of literary culture. As they track that culture through long-enduring prestige networks, Grossman, Spahr, and Young examine with sweep and sensitivity the double-bind of writers who confront in their work and lives the competing imperatives of political commitment and professional success. This is impressive scholarship—a fresh, fascinating account of how literary institutions capture, convert, and redirect potentially radical energies, as well as of how writers themselves struggle toward an impossible autonomy.