Reading Experimental Writing

Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.

The essays comprising this conceptually rich and astutely edited volume read contemporary experimental writing in terms of its engagement with a genuinely historical present moment, unfolding at manifold sites of turbulence. The result is a set of extraordinarily timely essays on aesthetic activism, reflecting an array of perspectives while sharing a sense of the contemporary as emergent and still incomplete. This is a powerful contribution to the moment, and one with long term significance.

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsPrefaceCharles BernsteinIntroduction: Reading Experimental Writing, Georgina Colby1. ‘Fog is My Land’ A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan, Jennifer Scappettone2. Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, and Others, Alex Houen3. Experiment, Inscription and the Archive: Kathy Acker's Manuscript Practice, Georgina Colby4. Rereading Race and Commodity Form in Erica Hunt’s “Piece Logic”, Chris Chen5. Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics, Sophie Seita6. On Joan Retallack’s Memnoir: Investigating ‘the Experience of Experiencing’, erica kaufman 7. A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall's Hyphenated Practice: Toward an Interdependent Model of Reading, Susan Rudy8. Reading Language Art on Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices, John Cayley 9. Charles Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin, Among Other Things, Peter JaegerNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex