Synopses & Reviews
This first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works includes some of the most respected writers and critics in the contemporary avant-garde.
We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.
The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.
The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.
Synopsis
The first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works
We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.
The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.
The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.
Synopsis
This first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works includes some of the most respected writers and critics in the contemporary avant-garde.
We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing.
About the Author
Laura Hinton is Assistant Professor of English at the City College of New York and author of The Perverse Route of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from "Clarissa" to "Rescue 911." Cynthia Hogue is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and author of Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity.
Table of Contents
Introduction: oppositions and astonishing contingencies / by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue -- Part i. Formal thresholds -- A poetics of emerging evidence: experiment in Kathleen Fraser's poetry / by Eileen Gregory -- Asterisk: separation at the threshold of meaning in the poetry of Rae Armantrout / by Ron Silliman -- Alice Notley's experimental epic: "an ecstasy of finding another way of being" / by Susan Mccabe -- Intimacy and experiment in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Empathy / by Charles Altieri -- Part ii. In the margins of form towards a new politics of representation? absence and desire in Denise Chavez's The last of the menu girls / by Analouise Keating -- Beyond the frame of whiteness: Harryette Mullen's revisionary border work / by Cynthia Hogue -- Untranslatable communities, productive translations, and public transport: Rosmarie Waldrop's a key into the language of America and Joy Harjo's The woman who fell from the sky / by Jonathan Monroe -- "Nothing, for a woman, is worth trying": a key into the rules of Rosmarie Waldrop's experimentalism -- by Lynn Keller -- Rules and restraints in women's experimental writing / by Carla Harryman -- Part iii. The visual referent/visual page -- Im.age . . . dis.solve: the critical image in the poetry of Ann Lauterbach and Norma Cole / by Charles Borkhuis -- Postmodern romance and the descriptive fetish of vision in Fanny Howe's The lives of a spirit and Lyn Hejinian's My life / by Laura Hinton -- "Drawings with words": Susan Howe's visual poetics / by Alan Golding -- "Bodies written off": economies of race and gender in the visual/verbal collaborative clash of Erica Hunt's and Alison Aaar's Arcade / by Linda Kinnahan -- Part iv. Performative bodies "in another tongue": text, image, body in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dicte / by Elizabeth A. Frost -- Painful bodies: Kathy Acker's last texts / by Nicole Cooley -- "Eyes in all heads": Anne Waldman's performance of bigendered imagination in iovis / By Heather Thomas -- "Sonic revolutionaries": voice and experiment in the spoken-word poetry of Tracie Morris / by Kathleen Crown -- Capillary currents: Jayne Cortez / by Aldon Nielsen -- Afterword: "Draft 48: being astonished" / by Rachel Blau Duplessis.