Taking stock of the Warehouse Cooperative School: A personal inventory of the formation of adolescent subjectivity in the context of 1970s alternative education

TL;DRAbstract

Constructed according the conventions of a subgenre the author defines as "formation text," this creative non-fiction work is an experiment in form that addresses the experimental coming of age of a subject within an experimental era and within the more specific context of an experimental education. Playing off the name of a school the author attended in the 1970s, The Warehouse Cooperative School, its structure employs a series of lists, both organizationally--as a textual version of inventorying, and as metaphor for storage and retrieval of memory. As an overt challenge to the bildungsroman, and its unacknowledged influence on contemporary memoir, the work follows the writer's chronological process of composition, the inventory-in-the-making, rather than a chronology of past events, and examines those past events primarily through a series of "finds," both current and archival. As the writer moves from one artifact to another--a doctoral dissertation composed by someone else, past st

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