Synopses & Reviews
With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists of this century. Focusing also on women's avant-garde artistic practices, Suleiman demonstrates how to read difficult modern works in a way that reveals their political as well as their aesthetic impact.
Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by André Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avantgarde artists and theorists--including Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody.
Central to Suleiman's revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman's laughing mother embodies the need for a link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.
Review
"Well aware of the manifold ironies that attend the notion of an avant-garde tradition, Suleiman carefully deconstructs many of the paradoxes that accompany such a presumably radical enterprise. Through close examinations of the French writers AndrBreton, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Bataille, she goes on to uncover a sexual-political dimension to the work of the male avant-garde that has been left unexplored...A dauntingly comprehensive demonstration of the way different feminist approaches may be combined to engage a wide range of readings...A deep and moving insight."
--Perry Meisel, New York Times Book Review"[A] dense and witty, cultivated and bold, serious and high-spirited volume...Rich in the historical and critical insight of at least fifteen years' work in the field, responsive to two disparate women's movements--the French and the American--neither one of which is itself homogeneous, this series of eight interconnected essays offers a kaleidoscopic literary history--of texts, contexts, pretexts, and perspectives--which challenges...not only the maps, but the mappings of modernism/postmodernism that have been setting agendas in cultural studies and in the art world over the last half dozen years...The brilliance, agility, and wisdom of this [book] will give readers of any persuasion who are looking for a `politically,' or `humanistically' correct program plenty of reason to feel challenged."
--Marguerite R. Waller, English Language Notes"A compelling account of the way gender has shaped the historical avant-garde, above all in France. She investigates both how the material experience of gender informed men and women's participation in avant-garde movements and the use of gender in avant-garde representations. Her discussion is nuanced, careful to situate the problematic of gender and the avant-garde in its broader social and aesthetic contexts...It is clear that the book will continue to occupy an important place on the shelf of anyone studying the history and theory of the avant-garde both for its scholarship and for its fine close analyses of art and literature."
--Margaret Cohen, Annals of Scholarship"Surely one of the most important recent books on women and modernism."
--Canadian LiteratureReview
Well aware of the manifold ironies that attend the notion of an avant-garde tradition, Suleiman carefully deconstructs many of the paradoxes that accompany such a presumably radical enterprise. Through close examinations of the French writers André Breton, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Bataille, she goes on to uncover a sexual-political dimension to the work of the male avant-garde that has been left unexplored...A dauntingly comprehensive demonstration of the way different feminist approaches may be combined to engage a wide range of readings...A deep and moving insight. Perry Meisel
Review
[A] dense and witty, cultivated and bold, serious and high-spirited volume...Rich in the historical and critical insight of at least fifteen years' work in the field, responsive to two disparate women's movements--the French and the American--neither one of which is itself homogeneous, this series of eight interconnected essays offers a kaleidoscopic literary history--of texts, contexts, pretexts, and perspectives--which challenges...not only the maps, but the mappings of modernism/postmodernism that have been setting agendas in cultural studies and in the art world over the last half dozen years...The brilliance, agility, and wisdom of this [book] will give readers of any persuasion who are looking for a 'politically,' or 'humanistically' correct program plenty of reason to feel challenged. New York Times Book Review
Review
A compelling account of the way gender has shaped the historical avant-garde, above all in France. She investigates both how the material experience of gender informed men and women's participation in avant-garde movements and the use of gender in avant-garde representations. Her discussion is nuanced, careful to situate the problematic of gender and the avant-garde in its broader social and aesthetic contexts...It is clear that the book will continue to occupy an important place on the shelf of anyone studying the history and theory of the avant-garde both for its scholarship and for its fine close analyses of art and literature. Marguerite R. Waller - English Language Notes
Review
Surely one of the most important recent books on women and modernism. Margaret Cohen - Annals of Scholarship
Review
Subversive Intent is an original, innovative, wonderfully written, consistently intelligent, and unflappably smart book. It is a major contribution to feminist literary studies and to studies in twentieth-century literature. Canadian Literature
Review
These revisionist essays on the writing, particularly the écriture feminine, associated with the French avant-garde are a model of lucidity and good sense. Susan Suleiman is a marvelous critic--lively, energetic, incisive--and never less than interesting. Nancy K. Miller
Review
Suleiman shows the qualities that have long been associated with her work: theoretical power and tactfulness, scrupulous critical attention to the formal and the thematic, lucidity, balance, and sober delight in her engagement with her material, and splendid readability, Subversive Intent is an outstanding performance. Marjorie Perloff
About the Author
Susan Rubin Suleimanis the Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature, <>HarvardUniversity.
Table of Contents
Introduction Prologue: Playing and Modernity Pleasures of Theory
Metapolylogue: On Playing and Modernity
A Double Margin: Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France Of Margins and Avant-Gardes
The Surrealist Subject
Women in the History of Surrealism
Aggressions and Counteraggressions: Readability in Avant-Garde Fiction Reading and Rupture
Robbe-Grillet, or, the Readability of Transgression
Maurice Roche: Paradigm Lost and Found
Self-Reflexive Afterthought
Reading Robbe-Grillet: Sadism and Text in Projet pour une révolution à New York Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil Pornography as Textuality
Pornography as "Reality"
Feminist Poetics and the Pornographic Imagination
Love Stories: Women, Madness, and Narrative Mastery and Transference: The Significance of
Dora Breton, Charcot, and the Spectacle of Female Otherness
Duras/Lacan: Not Knowing as Entanglement
The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism Equal Rights, or, Telling It with Four-Letter Words
Celebrating Difference, or, Writing (and Reading) Otherwise
Dreaming beyond the Number Two
Feminist Intertextuality and the Laugh of the Mother Parody and Politics
Parody, Perversion, Collage: Surrealists at Play
Daughters Playing: Some Feminist Rewritings and the Mother
The Hearing Trumpet: Marian Leatherby and the Holy Grail
The Laugh of the Mother
Feminism and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending Une Histoire Bien Postmoderne
Discourses on the Postmodern and the Emergence of Feminist Postmodernism
Opposition in Babel? The Political Status of Postmodern Intertextuality
To Market, to Market: Oppositional Art in Mass Culture
Of Cyborgs and (Other) "Women": The Politics of Decentered Subjects
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index