Reading and Writing Experimental Texts ─ Critical Innovations

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy.

Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

Robin Silbergleid is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of multiple books, including the memoir Texas Girl and The Baby Book, a collection of poems.

Kristina Quynn is Faculty of English and founding director of CSU Writes at Colorado State University. She has published on transatlantic women’s writing and Irish drama and film.