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Writing the Self: Feminist Experiment and Cultural Identity Jill Darling Wayne State University

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Writing the Self: Feminist Experiment and Cultural Identity Jill Darling Wayne State University Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2012 Writing the self: feminist experiment and cultural identity Jill Darling Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Darling, Jill, "Writing the self: feminist experiment and cultural identity" (2012). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 431. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. WRITING THE SELF: FEMINIST EXPERIMENT AND CULTURAL IDENTITY by JILL DARLING DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2012 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved by: ________________________________ Advisor Date ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ DEDICATION This dissertation is for Fran and Dave, my support and counsel. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the encouragement, support, and assistance of a number of people. First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Barrett Watten, for his unending patience and support of my project in particular, and for his excitement regarding student projects in general. His classes helped me to broaden my knowledge and ideas about avant-garde art and literary practice in the twentieth- century. His insights, editing skills, counsel, and enthusiasm have been invaluable to my success with this project. Additionally, I have taken challenging and intensely instructive courses while in the graduate program at Wayne State, and I would especially thank Jonathan Flatley and renée hoogland for introducing me to texts and ideas in modernism, literary studies, gender and cultural studies in ways that I had not thought about previously. Their classes and conversation helped lead me further into the realms of poetics, gender, and culture and toward the completion of this project. Thanks also to Cannon Schmitt and Dana Seitler for helping me think about history and memory through seminar papers that worked as beginning points for some of the chapters in this dissertation. Thanks especially to my MFA advisor, Laura Mullen for introducing me to this path through my own writing and reading, to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her time and patience in participating in the endeavor of getting a dissertation finally to the defense, and to Carla Harryman and Christine Hume for giving me the opportunity to bring my research, creative writing, and teaching interests together as an instructor in the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University. I have learned so much from my classes and students at both Wayne State and EMU over the past few years. iii I would also like to thank the Bavarian American Academy, and especially the organizers of the summer seminar in American Studies: Meike Zwingenberger, Heike Paul, and Barrett Watten, as well as the student participants, for the financial support and dissertation insights and encouragement I received while participating in the seminar for the past three summers, in both Germany and Detroit. Thanks also to the Wayne State Humanities Center for the dissertation award I received in fall 2010, and the Wayne State Graduate School for awarding me a summer dissertation fellowship for summer 2011. Further, no thanks are complete without mention of the important personal support and encouragement I have received over the past six and a half years. Thanks to my fellow grad students from the first seminar to the last, and especially to my fun and friendly office mates: Ryan Dillaha, Justin Prystash, Selmin Kara, and Kim Lacey. Thanks to my awesome friends, confidants, and team of undying encouragement: Sara Kern, Sarah James, Kristine Danielson, Judith Lakämper, Vicki Abboud, Jessie Jones, Michael Schmidt, Laura Wetherington, Michelle Pierce, Veronica Corpuz, Jen Krafchick, Katie Godfrey, Drew Cory, Julie Raulli, Jean Leonard, Jennifer Dick, Jennifer Rupert, and Karen Farrelly. Thanks also and especially to my family: Nicki Rose, Ann Rose, Gretchen Rose, Rita Rose Zyber, and Martha Shue for taking me to the beach, feeding me, and keeping me grounded in the real world when other parts of my world were going in other directions. Thanks to my other teachers and mentors Emily Hoskins, Heidi Rohrbeck, and James Abney, who have taught me about the importance of “one breath one movement” and how to let things go and move on, starting with the (continuous) present tense. And finally, thanks to my companion and dog, Tasha, for keeping me on my toes and making sure I get out of the house regularly, and to most especially to my parents, Fran and Dave iv Darling, for their quiet and rational support of my professional endeavors. They are in the first and last place the ones who taught me to follow my instincts and do what I love. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………..iii Introduction. Writing the Self: Feminist Experiment and Cultural Identity …………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1. “I Am I Because My Little Dog Knows Me,” or, The Intertextual Self: Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian ……………..........44 Chapter 2. Third-Person Self (Narrated): H.D. and Beverly Dahlen ………................93 Chapter 3. The Text-Subject in Social Context: Pamela Lu, Renee Gladman, and Claudia Rankine ………………………......................................................157 Chapter 4. “Possibility is not a luxury”: (Re)presentation and (Re)identification in The Transformation, Borderlands/La Frontera, and Dictee …………………208 References ……………………………………………………………………………237 Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………249 Autobiographical Statement …………………………………………………..............252 vi 1 INTRODUCTION Writing the Self: Feminist Experiment and Cultural Identity This dissertation examines how twentieth-century experimental women writers construct non/narrative texts whose text-subjects mediate identity and call for increased possibilities for subject-identification in the world. The use of innovative formal strategies and experiment with narrative, combined with the content of identity critique, make these texts political projects that variously explore gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in relation to contemporary American culture. In this project I bring discussions of identity into the theorization of formally innovative writing. I work to move away from the kinds of essentializing practices of identity politics—in which subjects are fit into specific identity categories—and toward more complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation. I begin with the notion that identity categories, or markers, play out in different contexts and are, at different moments: simultaneous, fluctuating, overlapping, and spatial (instead of hierarchical). I then continue toward readings of literary texts that function as new models of identification for spatially contextualized subjects. This project is significant for the way in which it brings together a diverse selection of non/narrative writing by women in the twentieth-century, and combines textual and cultural analysis to think through identity issues in relation to contemporary social subjects. This project is grounded in literary modernism and moves into work by contemporary American women writers at the end of the twentieth century. I begin by pairing the work of Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian in chapter 1, and that of H.D. and Beverly Dahlen in chapter 2. As modernists, Stein and H.D. are key figures who negotiate identity and non/narrative writing, and are important influences for Hejinian and Dahlen. The paring of modern and contemporary 2 authors in the first two chapters illustrates a correlation between writing styles and practices as well as how these diverge from the early to late part of the century. Hejinian’s body of work, beginning in the 1970s, can be read as coming out of Stein and thinking avant-garde practice through her own contemporary politics as a Language poet. Dahlen seems to pick up H.D.’s Freudian project, and additionally incorporates deconstruction and feminist criticism of the 1970s and 80s in her work. Hejinian and Dahlen also serve as intermediaries between the modernist and later contemporary writers—many of whom have been influenced by modernists such as Stein and H.D., as well as subsequent avant-garde authors and practices. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on contemporary prose and hybrid works by Pamela Lu, Renee Gladman, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, Gloria Anzaldua, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. These writers, to different degrees, use a variety of formal strategies and problematize narrative autobiographical writing to simultaneously focus on language as instrumental to subjectivity and to represent “experience” as cultural content. They negotiate practices of avant-garde experimentation and writing that explores identity-as-process through examinations of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and history. Their text-subjects become witnesses to the discrepancies in culturally inscribed norms, and call for expanded possibilities for narrative and social representation; and the texts become new models for
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