Title: We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics
Abstract: We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing.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 Hejinina, 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.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 4
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