Reading and Writing Experimental Texts Critical Innovations [Hardcover]

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy.

Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

1 Critical Play: An Introduction.- 2 Ecological Echoing: Following the Footsteps.- 3 Carole Masos AVA and the Practice of Reading: Selves in Dialogue.- 4 Expert Witness: Living in the Dirt.- 5 Blah Blah Bleh: Bulimic Writing as Resistance.- 6 In the Soul of the Sidereal World: Mining Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohens The WunderCabinet for a Critical Model of Interdisciplinary Curiosity.- 7 Reading and Writing in Kristjana Gunnarss Rose Garden.- 8 The Water Will Hold You:  On Lidia Yuknavitchs The Chronology of Water.- 9 Writing a Sacred Self: Kathy Acker and Wonder / Amy Nolan.- 10 Impulses Toward a Telepathic Reading of Clarice Lispectors The Stations of the Body and The Beak of a Bird by Amina Cain.- 11 Still Life with My Grandmothers China: Mark Doty and the Lyric Essay.- 12 Lessons from Lying: Autobiographical Performances and the Conventions of Nonfiction.- 13 Take 12: A l“m