Women's Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter One: Homicidal Feminism: Negative Aesthetics in Valerie Solanas's Scum Manifesto Chapter Two: Kathy Acker's Fatal Strategies Chapter Three: 'The Remnant Is the Whole': History, Trauma, and the Politics of Absence in Theresa Cha's Dictee Chapter Four: Abjection and the 'Monstrous Masculine' in Chantel Chawaf's Redemption Chapter Five: Suspending Gender?: The Politics of Indeterminacy in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body Chapter Six: Becoming-Girl/Becoming-Fly/Becoming-Imperceptible: Gothic Posthumanism in Lynda Barry's Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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 Stein's 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.

Review :
Anyone interested in the internal variety of experimental writing by women will find Berry's book essential: the distinctions she establishes could become cornerstones for finer-grained future investigations of overall categories and individual texts. Writing against a North American tradition that tends to categorize works as either experimental or political, Berry's monograph highlights both the aesthetic and feminist value of writing styles that make us uncomfortable-that 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. [Berry's] 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 all-certainly 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. The book offers some very well-organized and detailed readings.