Women's Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique

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Women's Experimental Writing considers six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique in their fiction and feminism. The authors covered are Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry. These writers all share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class and nation-based experience that, they suggest, may only be represented accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality. Ellen Berry extends the anti-social negative critique predominant in queer studies by offering an alternative archive of feminist negative literary practices and explores the consequences of joining an anti-social critique with radical innovations in literary and cultural forms. She argues that the radical aesthetic practices the authors employ are central to the emergence of contemporary Western feminisms and in doing so rectifies a critical neglect of contemporary experimental writing by women, especially in politicized forms, within the still-emerging postmodern canon.

Reviews

Anyone interested in the internal variety of experimental writing by women will find Berrys book essential: the distinctions she establishes could become cornerstones for finer-grained future investigations of overall categories and individual texts. * Modern Philology *
Writing against a North American tradition that tends to categorize works as either experimental or political, Berrys monograph highlights both the aesthetic and feminist value of writing styles that make us uncomfortablethat make us experience the negative affect that they also represent ... She not only gives serious attention to a number of understudied works, but opens up a conversation between feminist political literary criticism and other criticism movements that have more explicitly embraced the negative. * Literary Research *
[Berrys] book analyzes a myriad of diverse writers and their prose texts as they engage negative aesthetics for overtly political, dramatically feminist purposes in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France As we learn in this book, the negative is not a negative term at allcertainly not for feminists or anyone who questions the false social ideologies of heterogeneity, its discourses, and its discontents. The negative is an aesthetic in that it is both reality and our survival strategy. It eschews political correctness, and it is a politically potent, intellectually demanding act. * Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature *
The book offers some very well-organized and detailed readings. * Contemporary Women's Writing *

Author Bio

Ellen E. Berry is Professor of English and American Culture Studies and Director of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University, USA. Her books include Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Steins Postmodernism (1992) and (as co-author with Mikhail Epstein) Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (1999). She is editor of the journal Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge.