Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists of this century. Focusing also on women's avant-garde artistic practices, Suleiman demonstrates how to read difficult modern works in a way that reveals their political as well as their aesthetic impact. Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by Andreacute; Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avantgarde artists and theorists--including Heacute;legrave;ne Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody. Central to Suleiman's revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman's laughing mother embodies the need for a link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• Prologue: Playing and Modernity
• Pleasures of Theory Metapolylogue: On Playing and Modernity
• A Double Margin: Women
• Writers and the Avant-Garde in France Of Margins and Avant-Gardes
• The Surrealist Subject Women in the History of Surrealism
• Aggressions and Counteraggressions: Readability in Avant-Garde Fiction
• Reading and Rupture
• Robbe-Grillet, or, the Readability of Transgression
• Maurice Roche: Paradigm Lost and Found
• Self-Reflexive Afterthought Reading
• Robbe-Grillet: Sadism and Text in Projet pour une revolution a New York
• Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's
• Histoire de l'oeil
• Pornography as Textuality
• Pornography as "Reality" Feminist
• Poetics and the Pornographic
• Imagination Love Stories: Women, Madness, and Narrative
• Mastery and Transference: The Significance of Dora Breton, Charcot, and the Spectacle of Female
• Otherness Duras/Lacan: Not Knowing as Entanglement
• The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism
• Equal Rights, or, Telling It with Four-Letter
• Words Celebrating Difference, or, Writing (and Reading) Otherwise
• Dreaming beyond the Number Two Feminist
• Intertextuality and the Laugh of the Mother
• Parody and Politics Parody, Perversion, Collage: Surrealists at Play
• Daughters Playing: Some Feminist Rewritings and the Mother
• The Hearing Trumpet: Marian Leatherby and the Holy Grail
• The Laugh of the Mother Feminism and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending Une Histoire Bien Postmoderne
• Discourses on the Postmodern and the Emergence of Feminist
• Postmodernism Opposition in Babel?
• The Political Status of Postmodern Intertextuality
• To Market, to Market: Oppositional Art in Mass
• Culture Of Cyborgs and (Other) "Women": The Politics of Decentered Subjects
• Notes Selected
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Suleiman (Harvard), author of Authoritarian Fictions (CH, Jan'84) and editor of The Female Body in Western Culture (1986), builds on her pathbreaking 1977 feminist, psychoanalytic study of the patriarchal qualities, the "Sadean intertext" of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Project for a Revolution in New York (CH, Nov'72). She shows that, despite the "energy, inventiveness, humor, and brilliance" of avant-garde male creators from surrealism onward, the works of most prove "anything but subversive." Helene Cixous's "Le Rire de la Meduse" (L'Arc, 61, 1975), introducing "autonomous subjectivity" and "the necessary irreverence of women's rewriting," leads Suleiman to develop the model of the playful, laughing mother. Using especially Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, Marguerite Duras, and Monique Wittig, Suleiman illustrates important contributions to avant-garde feminism. The exceptional range of sources, the provocative iconography, and, above all, the lucid, personal, and sometimes even playful style make this book a great pleasure to read, evoking Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (CH, Nov'75), which Suleiman acknowledges as inspirational to her. These eight essays provide an excellent background in the 20th-century avant-garde, as well as contemporary theory, especially feminism. A must for all collections. -A. M. Rea, Occidental College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Suan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of French at Harvard University, fled from Budapest as a child in 1949. She later returned to Hungary and wrote Budapest Diary as a result. Suleiman has also written feminist texts such as The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives and Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde.

(Bowker Author Biography)