Ben Lerner, Edges of Genre

Yannicke Chupin is Associate Professor at CY Cergy Paris Université, specializing in North American literature and metafiction in 21st-century writing. She has published books on Vladimir Nabokov and edited Mutations of Metafiction (Revue Française d'Études Américaines, 2019).Karim Daanoune is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry. His research centers on contemporary North American literature which includes Arab American and Arab Canadian writing. His work sits at the intersection of poetics, ethics, and politics.

"Ben Lerner, Edges of Genre, is an important and deeply engaging collection devoted to the work of Ben Lerner. ... the essays gathered here are incisive, illuminating studies of both his poetry and his fiction, and, in many cases, of the rich and productive crossings between those genres. The contributors attend closely to the formal innovations, intellectual rigor, and restless curiosity that define Lerner’s writing, offering fresh perspectives on a body of work that has helped shape contemporary literature. Lerner is, without question, one of the most significant writers of our moment. His work continually challenges assumptions about genre, representation, and the possibilities of literary art, while remaining attentive to the complexities of lived experience. The brilliance, ambition, and originality of his writing shine throughout this collection. Edges of Genre is a necessary and substantial contribution to Lerner studies, one that scholars, students, and devoted readers alike will return to for years to come as they think through the scope and significance of his achievement."—Peter Gizzi, poet; author of Fierce Elegy"For all you Ben Lerner geeks out there, here's a great just-out collection of critical essays that addresses Lerner's fusion & confusion of genres throughout his career. The whole kicks off with a brilliant new piece by Lerner himself about Rei Terada's theory of phenomenophila, the celebration of ephemeral experiences without the need to categorize them & thereby turn them into Kantian fact."—Lance Olsen, novelist; author of An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies

• List of Figures; List of Contributors; Acknowledgments; Erring Together; Introduction; Part I; Chapter 1 “Love // more avant-garde than shame”: Ben Lerner’s Ethical Aesthetics; Chapter 2 “Bodies, streetlights, mixed media”: 10:04 and the Mediated Experience; Chapter 3 Autofiction, Privilege, and Redemption; Chapter 4 Autofiction, Mediation, Parasocial Politics: Ben Lerner Against Authenticity; PART II; Chapter 5 The Stuttering Novel: Reading the Prosody of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School with Gilles Deleuze; Chapter 6 “Heard melodies are sweet / but those unheard are sweeter”: Impossible Music and Poetic Voice in Ben Lerner’s Gold Custody; Chapter 7 Angle of Inclination / Angle of Yaw: Lerner’s Conversation with Celan; Chapter 8 “Between the Terrestrial and the Divine”: On Ben Lerner’s Poetics; Chapter 9 Determining Art as Thrice Removed: Leveling Ben Lerner’s Tower of Representation; PART III; Chapter 10 The Instrument with Which It’s Cut: Ben Lerner’s Bildung and the Song of the Fungible; Chapter 11 “Crucial Betweens”: The Politics of Intermediality in Ben Lerner’s Artistic Collaborations; Chapter 12 Virtual Theory and Actual Practice: The Language of Critical Theory in the Novels of Ben Lerner; Chapter 13 Kansas and Effect: Critique, Causality and the Theoretical Forms in/of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School; Chapter 14 Ben Lerner and Conspiracy Poetics