HOW2Readings bboks

 

 

 

In this issue, guest editor Jeanne Heuving collected and organized the readings into two groups, “WRITING EROTICS” and “ON HOW(ever)

WRITING EROTICS

Jeanne Heuving

Two decades have passed since the highly charged French writings of H幨鋝e Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, among others, exploded the Anglo American and Anglo Canadian scene.  Since then, these poet-theorists have been explored, forgotten, referenced, delimited, put in their place, put in the wrong place.  Yet, the question of female erotic agency that they interjected, perhaps the most salient aspect of their wildfire dissemination, has hardly been attended to, barely answered.  The poetic-theoretical writings gathered here meet the earlier rapturous ecriture with their own blithe contemporaneity.  Often more attentive to particular social formations, more alert to postmodern singularity, than the French writings, these Anglo Canadian and Anglo American writings like their predecessors produce their erotics as hybrid meditations—writing between discourses, between languages.

 

ON HOW(EVER)

Jeanne Heuving

Emerging in 1983 at a time in which exclusionary identity politics often dominated feminist agendas, the small journal How(ever) defined itself more loosely and variously—as a site of exchange for women scholars and writers focused on innovative writing.  As Rachel Blau DuPlessis comments in her piece below, How(ever) and its electronic sequel HOW2 came to nurture four generations of women writers, including the dead, but recoverable early generation of modernist women writers who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century.  How did this small, unprepossessing journal come to locate such wide spread writing energies? The following essays begin to establish a small archive of feminist scholarship on How(ever), no doubt the subject of more feminist scholarship to come.

 


READINGS: guest editor Jeanne Heuving

Bio: Jeanne Heuving has published critical work on several modernist and contemporary innovative women writers, including the book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. A section from her recently completed multi-genre manuscript, Snowball, appears in HOW2 – no. 4. Her work has also appeared as a chapbook, Offering (bcc press), and in Common Knowledge, Talisman, and Clear Cut. She has recently completed a lengthy article, “'A Dialogue About Love [. . . in] the Western World' / Tracking Leslie Scalapino.” She is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Bothell, and on the graduate faculty of the University of Washington. She is a recipient of NEH and Fulbright research grants and is a member of the Subtext Collective.


WRITING EROTICS

Lissa Wolsak
“An heuristic prolusion

Susan Clark
as lit x: the syntax of adoration”

Kathleen Fraser
To book as in to foal. To son.

Carla Harryman
Parallel/Play"

Leslie Scalapino
transcription-(or lineage) as visual


On HOW(ever)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
A few words about HOW(ever), 1983-1992”

Kathleen Fraser
The Jump: Editing HOW(ever)

Linda Kinnahan
'A Peculiar Hybrid': The Feminist Project of HOW(ever)

Elisabeth Frost
HOW(ever)and the Feminist Avant-Garde”

Ann Vickery
Kathleen Fraser's Feminist Alternative: HOW(ever)


about this section:

Investigation of the poetics/politics of intentionality may be considered as a significant element of this section, as well as questions of canon formation, public access, the reviewing process, etc. These writings may be original or reprinted (by permission), and will include conference papers relevant to the HOW2 project. Reflections on the poem-making process are encouraged, as well as more formal essays. Bios and photos are always requested; when they don't appear, it is at the discretion of the writer.

The guest editor for "reading/s" H2/n6 to be announced shortly.

 

 


go to this issue's table of contents