This panel considers the manner in which collectives, formal or informal, shape the production and the means of production of literary texts. Literary production has long been sited within collective labor structures, be it the coalescence of writers in salons and workshops, or the aesthetic echoes between and across contemporaries’ works, or the collaborative demands of literary production that necessitate a mutual reliance between editors, writers, printers, publishers, and booksellers.

However, the topic is especially relevant to consider at this moment in time, in which consolidation of major publishing houses and a contraction of conventional means of supporting artists and presses producing literary texts (i.e. academic tenure, governmental grants, and publishing contracts) threaten writers' and publisher's access to the time and money necessary to produce literary objects, from idea to printed/programed object delivered to a reader's hands/screens. What collectively organized means do writers turn to under these conditions? How do strategies of collaboration from the deep past offer opportunities in the present? How does new technological mediation open possibilities that make the collectives of the present different from those of the past? And how do we need to re-theorize or extend prior theorizations of collectivity to the present in a way that adequately complicates our understanding of the uses and limits of technology in collaboration? The panel is situated at the intersection of the history and theory of the book, media studies, Marxist cultural studies, and the sociology of literature, and cites relevant recent work by Mark Nowak and Amaranth Borsuk. It will feature three presentations of papers of about 17-18 minutes each and 15 minutes of unstructured discussion, plus time for a short (3 minute) introduction from the presider and very brief extemporizing by each speaker as they start their papers (1-2 minutes each).

Stacie Vos will present "Emma, Christina, and Gunhilda: Collectives of 20th-century Female Medievalists," which considers the medieval technology of the book and what the culture of medieval women's writings offered to collectives of female scholars in the early twentieth century as they found ways to study medieval literature despite being largely excluded from degree-granting programs and bibliographical societies. This paper examines two examples of the many groups women interested in the history of the book formed of their own in the early decades of the 20th century: Hope Emily Allen's informal collective in the UK, the "three daughters of Deorman"; and Belle da Costa Greene's US-based Hroswitha Club. Allen's correspondence preserves intimate relationships with other solitary researchers and exchanges with and about some of the most established societies and figures within medieval literary history–the ACLS, the Medieval Academy, J.R.R. Tolkein.

Andrew Gorin's paper, "Imagining Communities: Crowdsourced Collaborations and Collective Authorship," considers the use of the twentieth-first-century technology of the crowdsourced document to consider the possibilities and limitations of this technology for collaboration and political action. His paper considers “Executive Orders,” a collaborative, freeform, emergency prose poem that Gorin founded and edited, which unfolded real-time responses to current events and the U.S. socio-political landscape following the 2016 election in response to the relentless barrage of Donald Trump's dystopian executive orders. The paper considers crowdsourcing as an alternative to norms of authorship valorizing individual genius and serving the ends of marketing conventions. This paper takes Executive Orders as a jumping off point for a discussion of comparable collaborative-writing and art projects, including the Language's The Grand Piano (1975-1980), and the Bernadette Corporation’s Reena Spaulings (2004), as well as recent thinking about crowdsourced “social-practice” and archival writing such as Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics, the Blunt Research Group’s The Work-Shy, and recent journalistic pieces in publications from NRP’s Morning Edition to Wired.

Travis Sharp will present "Institutional Creep in (Bio)Technological Literary Production" to examine the ways collaborations between literature and technology are funded and the effects this has on the nature of collaboration. He argues that the through the mid-20th century to the present, the exponential expansion of computation and biological technologies have opened a new site of collective labor: between the writer and programmer or laboratory scientist. An important outcome of this contact zone between aesthetic and technological/scientific production is the institutional creep that occurs: how literary projects that are situated within this contact zone are collective and collaborative in an increasingly grant-funded and institutionally-situated fashion. He explores this through a review of texts’ labor collectives, focusing on ABRA by Kate Durbin and Amaranth Borsuk in collaboration with Ian Hatcher and a number of other designers and institutions, as well as Eduardo Kac’s and Amy Karle’s bio-technological experiments.