Alan Ramon Clinton – författare

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers’ means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.

Using the idea of 'parability,'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramón Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forché, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner.

Using the idea of ''parability,''or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramón Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forché, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner.

Using the idea of 'parability,'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramón Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forché, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner.

Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize, Necropsy in E Minor is the tale of a young college professor who sits down to write what he calls a "e;memoir,"e; but which really only records the past six months of his life (with numerous digressions), and ends, with the last line, after a richly devastating encounter, at the moment of writing.Who is this person? That is kept a secret, despite the fact that he is writing for no audience other than himself. His name does not appear, but those of others do, necessary to ensure the accuracy of the anagrams and puns that have helped map his universe since he found "e;The Note."e; Given his disposal to interpret this anonymous confessional/fantasy story, an endeavor undertaken with the firm belief that it was written for him, by someone he knows, and purposefully left for him to find.Having abandoned the scholarly methodologies and subjects that would actually allow him to attain tenure, our professor on the lam performs all manner of linguistic analyses of the note, drives around the rim of Florida (the pilgrimage method, fittingly circular), desperately uses inkblots, the I Ching, and tarot cards for practical advice, adopts a cat named Sanity, becomes an amateur ornithologist, develops a theory of "e;instantaneous architecture,"e; endures a shamanic experience, and eggs himself on with the hope that, no matter what happens, his "e;memoir"e; might one day be found by archaeologists and thereby provide a key to human life at the close of the twentieth century.

Stalking academia, re-ordering double printsand rewriting the autobiography of Buster Keaton, Clinton's hapless and sophomoric intellectual narrator offers his poignant and funny insights on modern-day culture in a series of slapstick misadventures.