This dissertation examines how the literary concerns engaged by seven writers—Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Gl ck, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen—illustrate a struggle within the field of literature, and particularly with regard to poetry, as many writers turned partially or entirely away from verse toward a prose-based poetics. Some of these writers offer a theory and practice of communal intellectual labor as a response to poetry's insufficiency for social engagement, while others harness the possibilities of excess, pleasure, narrative, flight, and the affirmation of insufficiency itself as radical responses to the problems of poetry as they saw them. Grouping these writers loosely into contentious but permeable communities mobilized around conceptions of the New Sentence, Distributed Narrative, New Narrative, and Fugitivity, I argue that this literary field can be characterized as simultaneously communal and contestatory. Literary experimentation for these writers is tied to and traversed by social struggles which the writing itself reveals. Reading these writers enables us to understand in singular, highly articulate cases how gender, sexuality, class, politics, and race are ever present, constitutive constraints around, in and through which all texts emerge. Insistently occupying positions on the margin, many of these writers purposively undermine conceptions of the literary canon and propose a move away from more traditional conceptions of literature, particularly literature as an expression of nationalism. They seek to produce a range of cacophonous counter-hegemonic literatures enabling the possibility for diverse and ethical engagements in the social field and in the context of postmodern subjectivity. Drawing on the scholarship of varied fields such as literature, African American, cultural, feminist and queer studies, I consider these disparate writers within the context of a field loosely demarcated by geography, historical moment and aesthetic project. This method enables me to consider such pertinent questions as who writes, why, how, and—virtually and actually—for whom. In other words, what is the archive of experimental writing and how and by whom is it constructed.