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Communal Nude: Collected Essays
"I read and wrote to invoke what seemed impossible—relation itself—in order to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to 'wake up' to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing."
—from Communal Nude
Since cofounding San Francisco’s influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America’s finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück’s nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück’s essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. “I’d laugh at (make art from) any version of self,” Glück writes, “I write about these forms—that are myself—to dispense with them, to demonstrate how they disintegrate before the world, the body.” For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing.
Glück’s essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, self-reflection, anecdote, escapade, and “metatext.” These texts span the author’s career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O’Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück’s essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice.
—from Communal Nude
Since cofounding San Francisco’s influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America’s finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück’s nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück’s essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. “I’d laugh at (make art from) any version of self,” Glück writes, “I write about these forms—that are myself—to dispense with them, to demonstrate how they disintegrate before the world, the body.” For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing.
Glück’s essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, self-reflection, anecdote, escapade, and “metatext.” These texts span the author’s career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O’Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück’s essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice.
392 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2016
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278 people want to read
About the author
Robert Glück
38 books69 followersBorn in Cleveland, poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist Robert Glück grew up there and in Los Angeles. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA. He also studied writing in New York City workshops with poet Ted Berrigan and earned an MA at San Francisco State University.
With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.”
Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.
Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.
With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.”
Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.
Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 19, 2020
Deze essaybundel bevat alle onderwerpen waarover ik wil schrijven en lezen. What's not to love?
(Note to self: Herlezen, herlezen, herlezen.)
(Note to self: Herlezen, herlezen, herlezen.)
July 7, 2016
Bob Gluck loves gossip and so do I. Bob Gluck loves Kathy Ack and so do I. Bob Gluck loves Bataille and I guess that's his right.
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July 7, 2024really curious way to understand the project of New Narrative and its dedication to language and community as enfolded in one another- a response to new criticism’s pure formalism in the wake of 68, in the midst of the bay area’s queer blosssoming and its circuits of performance art. to me new narrative and the way glück approaches it is about a destabilisation of meaning located in the idea that all fiction is co-existent with life in many different senses: in the bleed between irl and fictive life in autofiction, in the attentiveness to both the action in a given work and the act of reading by the reader, in the way glück emphasises the importance of community and influence when he writes about it (wrt small press traffic) and in his writing (inviting people to edit his own autofictional depictions of them).
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May 17, 2016Robert Gluck is a foundational writer in LGBT literature. This nonfiction collection is a great over-view of his life and also of his social and formal interests.
March 22, 2018
Robert Glück is a poet and fiction writer in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the smartest people I've every met. I'm grateful to Semiotext(e) for publishing a collection of his essays. While reading anthologies is never quite the same as reading a longer, continuous work, Glück's essays are genuinely engaging, sharp as a Wüsthof chef's knife, and wonderfully queer. Like all good essayists, Glück manages at least one memorable, quotable line in every essay: my copy is now copiously underlined. "So when communities are eroding or inventing themselves, the structures of personal life become visible." Whether he is discussing The Lucy Show or pornography, Edgar Allen Poe or Bataille (in the same essay), or the various strains of so-called New Narrative, Glück is always on the money (shot). "In some circumstances, I am Homosexuality." Oh, Bob, you certainly are! And thank you, Semiotext(e), for the Jess collage on the front cover (discussed in the essay on p. 139).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews