The CounterText interview : Annette Gilbert

Abstract

‘Literature is not what it used to be,’ CounterText suggested in its first editorial, before reflecting that critical rhetoric around ‘decline or evolution – or both’ might instead consider ‘the sense that today the literary might simply be elsewhere’. For the journal’s editorial team, the publication of Annette Gilbert’s Literature’s Elsewheres: On the Necessity of Radical Literary Practices (MIT Press, 2022) is therefore an event of some resonance. The book offers a comprehensive, analytical survey of radical works that interface with conceptual art and practices of ‘conceptual writing’ to put into question default understandings of text and work; writing and reading; page and book; paratext and parergon; authorship and readership; publication and production; marketing and cataloguing; appropriation and translation; copy and instantiation; and the sites and institutions of the literary itself. The study is well-served by its ability to range over diverse literary elsewheres originating variously in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and beyond. In the process a different canon and poetics of radical literature, one unbounded by the repertoires of modernist or postmodernist play and distinct from, say, the departures of electronic literature, could be said to emerge.