Mêmewars

Adeena Karasick

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars 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, Mêmewars 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, intentioin is delegitimized as the centre-piece decentres, and becomes yet another beginning.

 

Reviews:

“[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

“Mêmewars 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