Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, ?A poem can be made of anything, ? even newspaper clippings. In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience?or, indeed, an alternative form of life?as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.