Women-A Cultural Review最新文献

{"title":"Close/Reading","authors":"Abbie Garrington","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2021026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2021026","url":null,"abstract":"Lauren Berlant writes of intimacy as a kind of intimation (promise; expectation; agreement), and as having, therefore, the quality of a pact. That pact links to the matter of bringing-close that is at the heart of Elsa Högberg’s edited collection Modernist Intimacies—creating intimate proximity between people; between person and text; or between person and person, as mediated by text. Such closeness has its emotional aspects, but is also about specifically bodily proximity (or, in the case of text, its imagined or projected equivalents), bringing the tactile into view, adding tact to pact. The late, lamented Berlant operates as a presiding spirit for this group of 12 essays, although she is more often glancingly acknowledged than fully deployed, with the exception of Högberg’s own valuable chapter on Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Here, Högberg uses both Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Eva Illouz’s ‘cold intimacies’ to read West as offering an exploration of emotional solace (via the advice column indicated by his title) as not just cover for but obstruction to the collapse of material inequality and the pursuit of a happy life. Högberg deftly situates her own arguments amongst extant West criticism, and draws a thread from the US inter-war advice industry toward modernity’s cold intimacies, suggesting that in the present day, too, intimacy and compassion have political dimensions that may pull them clear of care. Our Covid-affected times are marked by the apparent absence of new intimacies, yet shaped by public regulations and discourses that recalibrate regimes of the intimate, including those previously, precariously considered private. As a result, this collection, while its focus is on the early years of the twentieth-century and for the most part on artistic production considered ‘modernist,’ can also be read as excavating the pre-history of today’s formulations of our intimate lives. Högberg’s ‘Acknowledgements’make reference to the joy of compiling and editing the collection, and some of that joy can surely be attributed to the first chapter, from Axel Englund, on the seep of Wagner’s music into the intimate spaces of the bourgeois home—both cover for and prompt to Elsa Högberg, ed., Modernist Intimacies, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback 9781474441834","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"13 1","pages":"142 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78517504","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":"(Re)turning to Quin: An Introduction","authors":"Nonia Williams","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2019437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2019437","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ann Quin’s innovative, versatile oeuvre made a substantial contribution to 1960s and 1970s British avant-garde and experimental writing, but literary scholarship has, until recently, been slow to appreciate the brilliance and importance of her work. This special issue of Women: a cultural review is the first collection of its kind focused solely on Quin. To frame the collection, I offer a short introduction to Quin’s work and life, and discuss how her working-class identity has been considered a significant factor in relation to the distinctive forms, language, aesthetics and experimentation of her writing. I introduce the volume’s contributions, which include an interview, a creative-critical piece, and four critical essays on Quin, to show the correspondences, overlaps and contrasts between them. In particular, I focus on their consideration of archive materials, and the aesthetic and sensory qualities of Quin’s writing. I argue that, precisely by being read together, the contributions deepen and extend our thinking about Quin, give a sense of current critical approaches to her work, and provide a key opportunity to reflect on the significance of our impulse to return to her work today.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"3 1","pages":"2 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82769732","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":"Little Tin Openers: Ann Quin's Aesthetic of Touch","authors":"D. Hansen","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2019440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2019440","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although critics have often noted Ann Quin's ‘literary geometry’ (Jordan 2020: 151) and ‘visual composition’ (Stevick 1989: 238), little has been made of the way her use of shapes and surfaces relates to contemporaneous developments in 1960s visual arts. Taking as its starting point Quin's specific art-world context, this essay reads Three (1966) in the light of post-war artists’ anxieties surrounding figuration and their turn towards the potentially generative effects and affects of disfiguration. I go on to consider how Niklaus Largier's account of aesthetic experience as ‘touch and being touched’ is fitting for the way Three makes of literature a plane of perception where figures move tenuously in and out of reach. But while Quin's characters look vainly to figures – human, inanimate, whole, fractured – in pursuit of aesthetic experiences, such ‘touch’ is usually withheld, deferred, or even made violent. What emerges is a view of Quin's particular mode as setting forth an aesthetic of touch where objects trigger not exalted experience so much as marking post-war conditions to be reckoned with, however elusive, equivocal, and resistant to resolution they may be. With this, Three seems to endorse the idea that an artwork at best can be an ‘emotive form’, as Donald Judd put it in 1967, with its characters typifying late-modernist concerns surrounding representation, what makes ‘good’ art, and performance more generally.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"34 1","pages":"52 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73923392","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":"Ann Quin on Tape: Three’s Auralities","authors":"Adam Guy","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2020011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2020011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article attends to the aural dimensions of Ann Quin’s Three (1966). It argues that just as high modernist texts developed symbiotically with the emergent sound technologies of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, so might Quin’s novel be read for its engagement with the tape recorder which rose to commercial prominence after 1945. Aiming to contextualize Quin’s writing on tape, the article considers the history and prehistory of the medium, as well as its appropriation by Quin’s contemporaries in music, film, and the visual arts. Through the figure of tape, Three finds ways of valuing ambience and materiality, while resisting transactional and suspicious forms of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"89 1","pages":"73 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73900138","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":"‘S’ and ‘M’: The Last and Lost Letters Between Ann Quin and Robert Creeley","authors":"C. Clarke","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2019439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2019439","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In her last letter to Robert Creeley, Ann Quin mentions that she has ‘been clearing out a lot of suitcases crammed with letters’. By contrast, Creeley kept this letter and one other inside his own copies of Quin’s novels, Three and Passages, separating them from his main collection of her papers. The filing of Quin’s letter inside Three suggests that the act of retrieving her from an archive could be at odds with her novel’s exploration of a couple’s disastrous attempt to recover ‘a life’ for their missing lodger, ‘S’. Echoing the presentation of ‘S’ in Three, ‘M’ in Creeley’s short prose piece, ‘Mabel’, reiterates Quin’s critique of historical rescue: ‘a sadly endless consequence of [M] shall be trailed through minds of her time like roses’. The echoes between the missing figures in Quin and Creeley’s texts can be read, I argue, as symptoms of the way in which Quin sought to refuse the limited cultural position available to women writers in the 1960s by embracing states of loss and withdrawal.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"33 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78286791","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 Maternal and Feminist Film Theory","authors":"Robin Blaetz","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2021027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2021027","url":null,"abstract":"The intriguing title of Lauren Bliss’s first book suggests the confluence of two discourses that are rarely paired in film studies: [feminist] film theory and the maternal. The first is framed in this study as a system that offers essential observations about the place of representation in culture, but is in need of interrogation because of what is felt to be its detrimental effect on lived life. The final line of the introductory chapter states the book’s intention","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"61 33 1","pages":"146 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82417654","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 Case for Narratology: Black British and African American Women’s Writing","authors":"N. King","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2020026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2020026","url":null,"abstract":"The clarion call of political moments of reckoning, like the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s and, at present, the Black Lives Matter movement, often startle readers, editors and publishers who are unfamiliar with black women’s writing or were previously unconvinced by its commercial and literary potential into different perspectives. Each generation, it would seem, must learn anew how this writing traverses a rich and varied terrain, and how its themes, styles and subgenres are unpredictably ‘relevant’. Eschewing this generational amnesia is Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George’s edited collection, Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form: it demonstrates a mature, nuanced understanding of black women’s writing on both sides of the Atlantic, and in doing so offers an elastic interpretation of ‘contemporary’. The editors’ concern with form and with ‘ethical dilemmas’ connected to race and gender presents an excellent lens through which to consider canonical and less well-known writers side by side. The collection offers readers—especially students and researchers—a needed set of case studies that engage black women’s literature in new ways, beyond the pursuit of an ‘ancestral line’ and ‘a maternal genealogy’ (7). With essays that foreground close readings and deploy critical frameworks ranging from affect theory to the aesthetics of difference, Wyatt and George build on the popularity of numerous monographs and courses that read black women’s writing cross-culturally and transnationally. They justify reading Black British and African American women writers together based on shared themes, similar influences and a common history of Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George, eds, Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. Routledge, 2020, £96.00 hardback 9780367189280","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"71 1","pages":"135 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90790723","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 Moving Towards Words & Then from Them’: Circling Passages, Circling Quin","authors":"Hannah Van Hove","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2020012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2020012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Whilst her first two novels, Berg (1964) and Three (1966), were generally well-received, the publication of Passages (1969) signalled a turn in critical success for Ann Quin. Apart from one anonymous review in The Times which praised the lucid and direct expression of particular observations and moments in the novel, Passages generally didn’t fare well in contemporary appraisals. It was repeatedly accused of being too obscure and of elevating technique above content. Yet despite its critical failure, Passages is the novel Quin herself found most exciting. This article explores the multiplicity of meanings gestured towards in Quin’s third novel whilst at the same time reflecting on the process of conducting archival research in her papers. The piecing together of information to better understand Quin’s life and work mirrors the search for an ultimate(ly elusive) meaning in this novel which destabilizes the notion of a singular coherent self. Consisting of both textual analysis as well as personal reflections on the archival research process, this article weaves together criticism and memoir, drawing inspiration from Quin’s own description regarding the process of writing Passages in which she compared the moving to and from words to jazz improvisations. In doing so, this article adopts a circling approach, approaching both the novel in question and its author slantwise, suggesting that the space of not-knowing might nevertheless be a productive one in which to engage with Quin’s life and work.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"66 1","pages":"93 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81024395","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":"‘Turning her Over in the Flat of my Dreams’: Visuality, Cut-up and Irreality in the Work of Ann Quin","authors":"H. White","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2020013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2020013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Drawing together dreaming and cut-up in Ann Quin’s work, this article considers the textual juxtapositions of the story, ‘Tripticks’ (1968), the latterly developed novel, Tripticks (1972), and Quin’s explicit incorporation of two ‘cut-up dreams’ into the narrative of Passages (1969). In placing cut-up segments together, a relationship—and a narrative—emerges, although not necessarily a plot-centric one, for ‘[p]lot can diminish in a forest of effects and accidents’ (Quin 1968, ‘Tripticks’: 14). Examining Quin’s development of ‘causeless’ narrative, with recourse to both psychoanalytic and countercultural accounts of the dream, I contend that Quin uses the motif and aesthetics of the dream to explore issues of agency, and dislocation between subject and environment. While W.S. Burroughs stakes his interest in the dream as a basis for (visual) literary invention in The Third Mind in 1967, claiming to be directing his attention ‘outward’, Freud suggests in 1899 that we ‘build our way out into the dark’ in the interpretation of dreams (550). The cut-up functions by the same logic, capitalizing on unpredictability, on not knowing what will come next. While Quin’s cut-ups produce comedy through surprising juxtapositions, their fracturing of temporal and spatial relations, and elimination of causality, result in a somewhat nightmarish ‘reality’ for her depicted subjects, emphasizing entrapment within the dream world over the liberational qualities of dream favoured by Burroughs, narrativising the tension between freedom and constraint inherent in the cut-up form.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"2 1","pages":"114 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83510019","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":"‘So thrilling and so alive and so much its own thing’: Talking to Claire-Louise Bennett about Ann Quin","authors":"Leigh Wilson, Claire Bennett","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2019438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2019438","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and went on to complete her debut book, Pond, which was published by The Stinging Fly (Ireland) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in 2015 and by Riverhead (US) in 2016. Pond was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and she also writes about art and is a frequent contributor to frieze. Her novel, Checkout 19, was published by Jonathan Cape in August 2021. In between finishing Pond and writing Checkout 19, she discovered Quin’s work. In 2021 she made a programme for RadioMoLi on Quin, Annie Ernaux and Tove Ditlevsen (https://moli.ie/radio/series/writer-presents/writer-presents-claire-louise-bennett/). Checkout 19 directly engages with Quin and her work, and in this interview she discusses why Quin’s work is so significant for her own.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"2 1","pages":"18 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90544729","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}