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The book examines American author Leslie Scalapino´s avant-garde poetics as an experimental form of realism in the speculative mode. Scalapino´s writings are considered here along the lines of the new materialist inquiry as well as new realist and speculative philosophical approaches.

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The author frames her reconstruction of the Bay Area poet, scholar, and experimental prose writer Leslie Scalapino´s transmedial poetics in the context of Scalapino´s published writings, available criticism of her works, as well as previously unpublished archival materials located among The Mandeville Special Collections and Archives at UC San Diego. Scalapino´s poetics are reconsidered here along the lines of new materialist modes of inquiry as well as contemporary new realist and speculative approaches that continue to grapple with the tension between thought and the social realm.

"This is a pioneering attempt at grasping the ways in which Scalapino´s oeuvre radically transforms our apprehension of the notion of reality." - Professor Zofia Kolbuszewska, University of Wroclaw

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Materiality of poetic writing - Neo-objectivism - Plasticity - Destructive plasticity - The fantastic - Contingency - Social world - New materialism - New realisms - Speculative realism - Cerebrality - The negative - Speculative mode - Poetic fiction - Extro-science fiction

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Malgorzata Myk, PhD, works at the Department of American Literature, University of Lodz, Poland, where she teaches contemporary women´s writing in North America. She is the author of critical articles and co-editor of two scholarly volumes of essays. She is also the recipient of Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship 2017/2018 (UCSD).

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