Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing

Ann Vickery explores the cultural politics of gender and community in the formation of Language writing. Contesting those increasingly normative accounts which seek to contain Language writing within familiar narratives of literary history, she draws on recent and hitherto unpublished archival material as well as interviews with the writers themselves. In a series of detailed readings and case studies, she investigates how gendered identities are made and consolidated through cultural practice and textual production. Accordingly, literary analysis is combined with an exploration of paratextual processes such as publishing, editing, theorizing, public readings, and talk series. Vickery further shows how Language writers tried to refigure authorship through processes such as collaboration, textual borrowing, clairvoyance, and counsel. The case studies include the works of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Tina Darragh, Joan Retallack, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Rae Armantrout, and Fanny Howe, as well as the formative stages of the journals L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and HOW(ever), Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press, and Susan Howe's radio program "Poetry."