Abstract
The period since 2008 has been characterized by persistence and restoration, the incomplete ending of the US era and the reassertion of the power of finance without global direction. If there was an art that matched this vacancy, it was perhaps neoconceptual poetry—itself a persistence and restoration of conceptual art that coalesced in the 1960s. Both conceptualism and neoconceptualism arise in the shadows of capitalist crises, specifically the two crises Giovanni Arrighi names as the “signal” and “terminal” crises of the US era, peaking in 1973 and 2008. The shift from an interest in plastic art to literature as the objects of critique of dematerialization in the two phases of conceptualism, things to words, further bespeaks the ongoing shift away from commodity- and toward service-centered economics in the period between the two crises. It is on this level that this chapter traces the connection between poetry and material contemporaneity.
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Clover, J. (2017). The Technical Composition of Conceptualism. In: Brouillette, S., Nilges, M., Sauri, E. (eds) Literature and the Global Contemporary. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63055-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63055-7_6
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