Abstract

American Language Writing constitutes a gradual critique of Modernist and New American Poetry functions in either their subjective or objective modes. Through differing strategies, Language Writers have, since the early 1970's, been attempting a renegotiation of the relationship of literature and semiotic culture through poetic and theoretical means. This work has resulted in not only a new direction for the poetic Avant-Garde in America, but a more productive political strategy for the contemporary individual faced with thematic and formal control by large scale information systems. ;This dissertation attempts to describe the development of such a strategy through a progressive thematic reading of the work of three Language writers . I argue that by virtue of these writers' increasingly distanced stance to epistemology's "thesis of the precedence of method" , Language Writing has been gradually separating itself from poetic Modernism and showing itself as the first 'Postmodern' poetry in the United States