Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-garde

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 André 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 Hélène 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.

Surely one of the most important recent books on women and modernism. A dense and witty, cultivated and bold, serious and high-spirited volume...Rich in the historical and critical insight of at least fifteen years' work in the field, responsive to two disparate women's movements--the French and the American--neither one of which is itself homogeneous, this series of eight interconnected essays offers a kaleidoscopic literary history--of texts, contexts, pretexts, and perspectives--which challenges...not only the maps, but the mappings of modernism/postmodernism that have been setting agendas in cultural studies and in the art world over the last half dozen years...The brilliance, agility, and wisdom of this book will give readers of any persuasion who are looking for a 'politically, ' or 'humanistically' correct program plenty of reason to feel challenged. -- Marguerite R. Waller "English Language Notes" A compelling account of the way gender has shaped the historical avant-garde, above all in France. She investigates both how the material experience of gender informed men and women's participation in avant-garde movements and the use of gender in avant-garde representations. Her discussion is nuanced, careful to situate the problematic of gender and the avant-garde in its broader social and aesthetic contexts...It is clear that the book will continue to occupy an important place on the shelf of anyone studying the history and theory of the avant-garde both for its scholarship and for its fine close analyses of art and literature.--Margaret Cohen "Annals of Scholarship " [A] dense and witty, cultivated and bold, serious and high-spirited volume...Rich in the historical and critical insight of at least fifteen years' work in the field, responsive to two disparate women's movements--the French and the American--neither one of which is itself homogeneous, this series of eight interconnected essays offers a kaleidoscopic literary history--of texts, contexts, pretexts, and perspectives--which challenges...not only the maps, but the mappings of modernism/postmodernism that have been setting agendas in cultural studies and in the art world over the last half dozen years...The brilliance, agility, and wisdom of this [book] will give readers of any persuasion who are looking for a 'politically, ' or 'humanistically' correct program plenty of reason to feel challenged.--Marguerite R. Waller "English Language Notes " Well aware of the manifold ironies that attend the notion of an avant-garde tradition, Suleiman carefully deconstructs many of the paradoxes that accompany such a presumably radical enterprise. Through close examinations of the French writers Andre Breton, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Bataille, she goes on to uncover a sexual-political dimension to the work of the male avant-garde that has been left unexplored...A dauntingly comprehensive demonstration of the way different feminist approaches may be combined to engage a wide range of readings...A deep and moving insight.--Perry Meisel "New York Times Book Review "