Re-writing the wor(l)d: Experimental writing by contemporary American women
Abstract
This dissertation breaks new ground in the scholarship on experimental writing in America. Currently, there is little work done in this field, particularly with respect to the work of contemporary women authors, who are the focus of this study. As I discuss in detail, few studies of women's experimental writing exist, and those that do rarely cross generic boundaries. Additionally, the critical approaches to experimental writing often result in the circumscription of the texts, replacing them in familiar categories and thus undercutting their insurrectionary potential. Using Gertrude Stein as a thematic and genealogical trope, I discuss in detail four texts published in the past 15 years as a means to uncover the radical potentials of experimental writing by American women. These authors and texts--Toni Morrison's Jazz, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland's Double Negative, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee--represent interventions into both the literary and political/social spheres. In literary terms, these authors rework generic conventions, seeking to make the historical novel, the romantic lyric, the autobiography, and the epic more amenable to their own experiences of self, history, and postmodernity. Additionally, they seek to foreground the ways in which both the traditional and re-visioned genres work to both create and alter cultural constructions. In political/social terms, these author's texts are aimed at unsettling conventions of reading and interpretation, requiring their readers to approach and respond to their works in innovative ways. Following my opening chapter, which surveys past and current scholarship, I offer readings of Morrison, Marlatt and Warland, Hejinian, and Cha that combine feminist, poststructuralist, and multicultural critical perspectives, ultimately situating these texts as examples of "resistant postmodernism."
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
O'Donnell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature|Canadian literature|American literature|Womens studies
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