We Who Love to Be Astonished

by Hinton, Laura; Hogue, Cynthia; Duplessis, Rachel Blau (AFT); Harryman, Carla (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780817310950
• ISBN10: 0817310959
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Alabama Pr

Summary

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 We Who Love to Be Astonishedcollects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing.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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Oppositions and Astonishing Contiguities	1	(14)
Laura Hinton
Cynthia Hogue
PART I. FORMAL THRESHOLDS
``A Poetics of Emerging Evidence'': Experiment in Kathleen Fraser's Poetry	15	(13)
Eileen Gregory
Asterisk: Separation at the Threshold of Meaning in the Poetry of Rae Armantrout	28	(13)
Ron Silliman
Alice Notley's Experimental Epic: ``An Ecstasy of Finding Another Way of Being''	41	(13)
Susan McCabe
Intimacy and Experiment in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Empathy	54	(17)
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	71	(10)
AnaLouise Keating
Beyond the Frame of Whiteness: Harryette Mullen's Revisionary Border Work	81	(9)
Cynthia Hogue
Untranslatable Communities, Productive Translation, and Public Transport: Rosmarie Waldrop's A Key into the Language of America and Joy Harjo's The Woman Who Fell from the Sky	90	(13)
Jonathan Monroe
``Nothing, for a Woman, is Worth Trying'': A Key into the Rules of Rosmarie Waldrop's Experimentalism	103	(13)
Lynn Keller
Rules and Restraints in Women's Experimental Writing	116	(11)
Carla Harryman
PART III. THE VISUAL REFERENT/VISUAL PAGE
Im.age... Dis.solve: The Linguistic Image in the Critical Lyric of Norma Cole and Ann Lauterbach	127	(13)
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	140	(12)
Laura Hinton
``Drawings with Words'': Susan Howe's Visual Poetics	152	(13)
Alan Golding
``Bodies Written Off'': Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt's and Alison Saar's Arcade	165	(16)
Linda A. Kinnahan
PART IV. PERFORMATIVE BODIES
``In Another Tongue'': Body, Image, Text in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee	181	(12)
Elisabeth A. Frost
Painful Bodies: Kathy Acker's Last Texts	193	(10)
Nicole Cooley
``Eyes in All Heads'': Anne Waldman's Performance of Bigendered Imagination in lovis 1	203	(10)
Heather Thomas
``Sonic Revolutionaries'': Voice and Experiment in the Spoken Word Poetry of Tracie Morrie	213	(14)
Kathleen Crown
Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez	227	(10)
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Afterword: ``Draft 48: Being Astonished''	237	(18)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Notes	255	(28)
Contributors	283	(4)
Index	287