{"title":"Women, Subalterns, and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction","authors":"Tran Thi Khanh Vi","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"31 41","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140081538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Denise Levertov’s “Histrionics”","authors":"Melissa Parrish","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that Denise Levertov’s antiwar poetry challenges contemporary assumptions about the limits of bearing witness to war. Contrary to George Oppen’s intimation that she should limit her writing to “authentic” accounts of her own domestic experience, Levertov wrote about her uneven relationship with the “here” of the Cold War homefront and the “there” of the Vietnam War’s violence. In grappling with these two seemingly disparate domains, she exposes the Cold War security state’s reliance on gendered household motifs to justify state-sponsored violence across geographic and temporal divides. Levertov treats wartime witnessing as an imaginative and critical encounter with racial and gendered violence—one that relies less on narrating discrete and directly observed events and more on challenging the permissibility of perpetual war itself.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"36 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140457207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Every Story Tells a Picture”: Suspended Time in Ali Smith’s Seasons Novels","authors":"Grace Cowtan","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through both the viewing and the reading of art, Ali Smith’s 2016–2020 tetralogy, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, posits an ethics of meaning–making that responds to the multiplicity of time-as-it-is-lived. This article explores how Smith portrays the viewing of art as an experience of temporal disjuncture by which habitual modes of perception and cognition are renewed. Ordinarily produced through a sequential linking of cause and effect, meaning is formed instead through a postcritical engagement, which proposes an interactive mode of understanding that operates within a network of relations. Open to difference and to alteration, this mode of interpretation is, I suggest, demanded from Smith’s readers as, through ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art), Smith suspends the temporal progression of narrative form.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"52 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139850263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Every Story Tells a Picture”: Suspended Time in Ali Smith’s Seasons Novels","authors":"Grace Cowtan","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through both the viewing and the reading of art, Ali Smith’s 2016–2020 tetralogy, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, posits an ethics of meaning–making that responds to the multiplicity of time-as-it-is-lived. This article explores how Smith portrays the viewing of art as an experience of temporal disjuncture by which habitual modes of perception and cognition are renewed. Ordinarily produced through a sequential linking of cause and effect, meaning is formed instead through a postcritical engagement, which proposes an interactive mode of understanding that operates within a network of relations. Open to difference and to alteration, this mode of interpretation is, I suggest, demanded from Smith’s readers as, through ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art), Smith suspends the temporal progression of narrative form.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":" 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139790369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Prince Charming with an Erection”: The Sensational Pleasures of the Bonkbuster","authors":"Amy Burge, Jodi McAlister, Charlotte Ireland","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The bonkbuster—an explosively popular genre of women’s writing in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—had an interesting resurgence in 2023. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claims to be a fan of bonkbuster author Jilly Cooper, whose novel Rivals (1988) is being adapted for television. But what is a bonkbuster? And how is it different from the genre with which it is most associated: the romance novel? In this article, the first to analyze the bonkbuster in detail, we focus on two concerns common to both forms—sex and relationships—and explore how bonkbusters revel in their own “badness.” We argue that the pleasures of a bonkbuster are rooted in their sensationalism and their ironic potential.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"324 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139799052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Prince Charming with an Erection”: The Sensational Pleasures of the Bonkbuster","authors":"Amy Burge, Jodi McAlister, Charlotte Ireland","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The bonkbuster—an explosively popular genre of women’s writing in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—had an interesting resurgence in 2023. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claims to be a fan of bonkbuster author Jilly Cooper, whose novel Rivals (1988) is being adapted for television. But what is a bonkbuster? And how is it different from the genre with which it is most associated: the romance novel? In this article, the first to analyze the bonkbuster in detail, we focus on two concerns common to both forms—sex and relationships—and explore how bonkbusters revel in their own “badness.” We argue that the pleasures of a bonkbuster are rooted in their sensationalism and their ironic potential.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139859141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Stuckness” and the Fraying Promise of Postfeminism in Contemporary Women’s Short Stories","authors":"M.K. Appleton","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpad025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While postfeminism is typically associated with upbeat feelings, such as confidence and resilience, scholars have begun to examine the emergence of less positive feelings alongside the compulsory outward presentation of enthusiasm. This essay examines feelings of “stuckness” in two short stories—“ Would Like to Meet ” (2014) by May-Lan Tan and “ Los Angeles ” (2020) by Emma Cline—and how these feelings illuminate the affective regulation of postfeminism. It also makes the case that the short story is an adept form through which to explore the contradictions of neoliberal femininity and that women short story writers are utilizing the tendencies of the form—particularly in regard to the short story’s ending—to re-create the lingering, non-cathartic feelings produced by the deteriorating promise of postfeminist culture.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"3 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139526193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking the Mother–Daughter Plot: Female Polyphony in Najat El Hachmi’s Migration Trilogy","authors":"Núria Codina Solx00E0;","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpad022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article traces the various representations of motherhood in the fictional work of the Catalan-Amazigh writer Najat El Hachmi. By using a contrapuntal reading that retrieves the silenced female voices implicitly embedded in the texts, the article underlines the importance of attending to linguistic and narrative polyphony both in narratives of mothering and in texts in which the mother plays a secondary role. This multilingual and feminist approach to Edward Said’s strategy of contrapuntal reading provides new tools to revisit Marianne Hirsch’s conception of the mother–daughter plot, demonstrating that the mother’s voice is not necessarily absent in narratives of daughters, but rather unheard.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"49 29","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139527642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence","authors":"Victoria Glista","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpad021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad021","url":null,"abstract":"In Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking (2018), the women of a remote Mennonite colony discover that they have been serially raped in their sleep, and so they meet to plot a nonhierarchical community of their own. I argue that this transformation relies on gestures, postures, and reorientations that spur liberatory new ways of perceiving and participating in the world; consequently, their bodily comportment is essential to revolutionary worldmaking, as well as to how we might approach the novel beyond its titular emphasis on speech. The women’s rechoreography of the colony’s norms also revivifies nonviolence as agonistic and egalitarian—a tentpole of the Mennonite faith. My reading works across the entanglement of movement and transformation in Women Talking before thinking through its rehearsal of bodily relations or set of gestural and postural ethics that ultimately dispose these women and survivors toward radical forms of care and interdependence, or what Judith Butler might call “aggressive nonviolence.”","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139218447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Opacity of the World: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time","authors":"Miriam Nandi","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad019","url":null,"abstract":"Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time explores the complex ways in which women relate to each other across cultural difference and generational gaps, as mothers and daughters, as rivals and friends. My article traces the friction between Black feminist group solidarity and aesthetic distance in Swing Time to suggest that the novel can be brought into dialogue with a postcolonial aesthetics of opacity, as coined by Édouard Glissant. The tension between opacity and transparency is the organizing principle of Swing Time, as the novel engages with movement and change, postcolonial spaces, and the mysteries of friendship, while vacillating between ironic narrative commentary and a more elusive aesthetics of concealment. Reading Smith’s work through a Glissantian lens also sheds light on affinities between her essayistic writing and her fiction.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"58 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139263015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}