The Vanishing Signs

What is a novel? What is a revolution? Is there anything new under the sun? In these essays, poet and critic Cam Scott contemplates the novel in various guises—as culture and technology; as labyrinth, series, list, and sect. Far from academic essays, these discrete and overlapping studies take up the activity of a politically interested readership, for whom literature makes real demands of the one world that it describes. Situating gay men’s experimental writing of the AIDS crisis within the cultures of neoliberal deregulation, and drafting a radical latency of the pre-revolutionary city, these essays fasten their interest to spaces of unexpected stylistic and thematic encounter.

In these essays, poet and critic Cam Scott contemplates the novel in various guises—as culture and technology; as labyrinth, series, list, and sect. Far from academic essays, these discrete and overlapping studies take up the activity of a politically interested readership, for whom literature makes real demands of the one world that it describes. Situating gay men’s experimental writing of the AIDS crisis within the cultures of neoliberal deregulation, and drafting a radical latency of the pre-revolutionary city, these essays fasten their interest to spaces of unexpected stylistic and thematic encounter.