American Paraliterature and Other Theories to Hijack Communication

Blake Stricklin is a lecturer at the University of Houston-Victoria, Texas.

“‘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”