Memewars

Description

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Memewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity the capitalist vision of literary originality, where ownership is of prime value. As a book that calls into question beginnings and ends, Memewars has no closure and no "back" cover; six individual texts work from two separate beginnings: they clash in the "middle" an unstable and shifting "centre." However through a self-reflexive practice of authorization, intention is delegitimized as the centre-piece decentres, and becomes yet another beginning.

Adeena Karasick Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She is currently Professor of Global Literature at St. John's University. Her writing has been described as "electricity in language" and noted for its "cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory". Karasick is a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series and is the winner of the MPS Mobile Award recognizing her as being the world's first "Mobile Poet".

"[Karasick] enacts language in a concrete way, so that it becomes a sort of golem figure she has animated through the sacred words. And she calls on the figural body of words (their etymology, morphology, phonology and usage) more than their meanings to build her poetry-essays." -- Canadian Literature "Memewars is electricity in language, eccentricity at its best where 'there's a profusion of presents.' This book makes eye contact with she and with me. It reminds me how being a reader can be exciting." -- Nicole Brossard