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Writing The Self: Feminist Experiment And Cultural Identity, Jill Darling

Wayne State University Dissertations

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 …