Rezensionen 127 this strategy increases the distance between readers and the text and at the same time invites the readers to look these words up, thus contributing to a better understanding of the culture described in the text. The volume will be helpful to students of literature, for it includes clear definitions of critical terms often used in contemporary research. For example, terms such as hybridity, transculturation, bicultural, transnational writers, historiographic metafiction, and narcissistic narrative are defined and discussed. At the same time, the usefulness of these heuristic tools in the study of contemporary world fiction is evaluated. And as William Boelhower notes in the introduction to the volume, “the notion of ‘world literature’ is as much a critical construct on trial as it is a global reality in the making” (11). Through its multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approach, the collection explains how literature is a telling of the world rather than a mere artistic discipline. The telling need not be realistic to be truthful. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard independent scholar France Kornelia Freitag, Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 128). Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2005. Flutur Troshani At the heart of Kornelia Freitag’s study, Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, lie three questions about women’s experimentation: how do women operate with language under the influence of contemporary critical developments of language theory, which are the bonds between the domineering paradigm and poetry, and to what extent are gender issues part of their writing? These three points of reference serve as safe anchorages for Freitag to develop her argument, because they insightfully reveal the progressive drive of women’s experimentation. On the whole, Freitag proposes to expand on the inner workings of women’s experimentation and to investigate why and how women experimentalists were able to assert themselves - albeit only relatively recently - inside the whole gamut of developments in Western thought and culture. The exact nature of the problem she deals with is to determine “the theoretical accomplishment and critical power” of women experimentalists “against assumptions that they wrote ‘just’ poems, and ‘pretty strange’ ones” (348). Freitag has developed an intelligent strategy to investigate this problem. She begins by locating its various dimensions - contemporary poetry by women, Rosemarie AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1 Rezensionen 128 Waldrop’s language games, Lyn Hejinian’s experimental poems with the genres of life writing, including biography, autobiography, and diary, and Susan Howe’s concept and practice of historiography. Each of these corresponds to a separate part of the book. In each part, she analyzes some of their poems, classifies their elements, outlines component structures, and finally articulates her interpretations. In the first part, Freitag discusses “contemporary women’s experimental writing,” including the “fiction” of a woman writer (17-24), the dynamics of gender in experimental poetry (24-43), the actual “visibility” of women in experimentation (61-68), and the postmodern tendency to challenge the mode of representation (69-89). Freitag picks the thread of Joan Retallack and convincingly situates her notion of “Poethical Wager” inside the context of her discussion. She agrees with Retallack in claiming that “women experimentalists inspect and reinvent in their texts the mechanisms of reality’s discursive representation” (3). Although women’s reality includes gender issues, their poems are not exclusively restricted to the bipolarity of male/ female. On the contrary, women’s writing involves a greater number of other “established normative discourses,” among which Freitag has identified three - philosophy, genre theory, and history as pertaining to Waldrop, Hejinian, and Howe respectively. To this point, she has located a common denominator for their experiments - the postmodern paradigm. “Postmodern and feminist re-visions in experimental women’s writing,” she argues, “are […] both a departure from and a risky engagement with traditional ways of literary representation […]” (3). The postmodern holds to the “function of language, genre, and media to construct reality.” It is possible therefore to create a whole “cultural critical practice in its own right” (10). Freitag forges significant links between women’s experimentalist texts and the “critical practice” that they insulate. She focuses upon three aspects of this practice - the dynamics of gender in experimental poetry (Language Writing), the development of feminist theory, and the “recent developments that led to the critical recognition of women’s experimental poetry as specific field of poetic practice” (24). These parallel aspects inspire experimentalist poets to shift ‘the crisis of representation’ and “the breakdown of the ‘cultural consensus on the representation of women and gender’” in particular into productive “poetic innovation” (71). This subversive potential emerges more clearly in the reading of eight poets, although Freitag has promised nine. They are Mei-mei-Berssenbrugge, Joan Retallack, Pam Rehm, Harryette Mullen, Tina Darragh, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser and Jenifer Moxley. In the second part of the published version of her Habilitation, Freitag inquires into the poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop. Waldrop argues that the point of contact between poetry and philosophy lies “in the radical turn of both discursive fields toward a [more] detailed investigation of language as both boundary and tool of knowledge” (102). It is important for her to investigate how the apparatus of language operates and how it can be used to explore knowledge. In Waldrop’s poetry there is, in fact, a progressive dissolution of allegiances among language, knowledge, presence, absence, and otherness as her poetry tends towards the state of being between opposites. The poet should “bind the play of absence and presence and unite the oppositions into a precarious linguistic whole” (91), she argues. “[I]t seems that it was just the artistic expression of the strangeness and undecidability (the ‘bet-ween’ess) of any culture, of any knowledge, of any Rezensionen 129 language, of any experience, and of any linguistic utterance,” Freitag argues, “that allowed Waldrop to write herself into the Anglo-American experimental tradition of poetry […]” (99). Waldrop’s inkling of the state of between-ness legitimizes her language games, which in turn insightfully demarcate themselves into experimental meta-texts. She ironically blends in her poems the “linguistic,” the “epistemological,” the experimental, and the theoretical (347). Rather than using language conventionally as a blueprint for perfection, Waldrop advocates a greater subtlety and suggests that language remains viable in itself. “What interests me most in poetry now is the shift of emphasis from the image (i.e. the relation of similarity) to contiguity: problems of combination, syntax, sequence, structure,” she claims (107). For Waldrop, poetry should be reconceptualized and put in its place inside the contemporary critical paradigm. In the third part, Freitag inquires into the poetry of Lyn Hejinian. Her poetry also contributes to and expresses the “critical-poetical re-conceptualization” of poetry and “Western thought and culture” (345). She does that by mixing various genres of lifewriting. Gesualdo, My Life, and The Cell characteristically share a common feature. In these texts, Hejinian questions the autonomy of brooding subjectivity by positioning the subject in different perspectives and by studying “the shifting sands of identity.” Her persona in My Life, for example, (re)discovers the multifaceted relationships between self and context, which among other things shapes the way we think and act. The functional link between the cultural context and “self-writing experiments” (345) in which Hejinian includes “biography, autobiography, travelogue, correspondence, and diary writing” (347) is reader-oriented. In My Life in particular, the participation of the reader is vital to (de)construct the text. In general, in this text, Hejinian presents chronological, processual, comparative, contrasting, and casual relationships in fresh and exciting ways. By blending genres, she creates texts that are innovative and gripping in their own special way. In The Cell, Hejinian investigates the complex relations between knowledge and writing. The text meditates upon the meaning of experience, knowledge, and their “cultural situatedness” (243). Overall, Hejinian’s texts converge on one point - the investigation of the self in life-writing texts lends an underlying intelligibility to our own intellectual pursuits that drives the poet to “participat[e] in the feminist project of reconsidering and redrawing the boundaries between the public and the private” (252). Her texts are public and private at the same time, cutting across the biographical and the autobiographical. She is very dexterous in indexing women’s changing perceptions and potential for transformation. In particular, she is very shrewd in tracing the essential contours of the self as it is fashioned under the influence of culture. In the fourth part, Freitag investigates the poetry of Susan Howe. Howe also challenges “theoretical textual practices” by incorporating into her poems revised versions of historiography. One of the assets of her writing is that she revises her poems as “critical revisions of a field of culture which has traditionally been thought to be governed by facts not by language and discourse” (347). History in her texts, including Hinge Picture (1974), Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1989), Singularities (1990), and Rückenfigur (1990), is presented as “put Rezensionen 130 into perspective (263). Howe presents history based on the “unconditioned and general claims of knowledge as foundation of an epistemology,” by the “rejection of […] abstract historical truth as foundation of traditional and materialist historiography,” and finally by the development of a postmodern poetic hermeneutics of absence which is preliminary and critical” (263). These are the reasons that Freitag has identified to account for Howe’s poems as revised historiography. These reasons also intersect with Howe’s considerations of feminist and postcolonial issues. Women experimentalists have applied in most of their texts specific strategies which thematize at heart the “discursive construction and reconstruction, concealment and naturalization” of femininity in an ongoing process of innovation. Their writing strategies explore “non-linear[ly], anti-mimetic[ally], and anti-hierarchical[ly]” the state of being a woman (346). As a result, the conventional representation of women is questioned in the same way as “[t]heories like ‘the death of the Author’” (French Poststructuralism) or ‘the author as product or effect of the text’ (Critical Theory) are questioned to full effect (347). The displacement of women writers as homogenous cultural symbols and their emergence as creators says much about the influence and potential of their texts. A minor weakness of Freitag’s study is the rather elaborate system of footnotes, found on 276 of the 348 pages of the book (! ), which at times develops the argument of the text far beyond the actual scope of the book. On the one hand, Freitag gives useful information about minor points and references, but on the other, the multitude of notes is often rather disruptive for the reading process. Until quite recently, the efforts of literary critics to assess the values of experimental texts by women have been rather limited. Often their texts have been interpreted as obscure and inaccessible, thus alienating both the expert and the public. This study stands against the skepticism that critics have expressed so far by turning attention to a body of valuable work and by advocating its integration inside the cultural mainstream. The real strength of this study lies in its analysis of “the ways in which women experimentalists criticize and subvert critical practices or representation in their texts” (347). It delivers their diverse attitudes and highlights their potential for innovation and brings experimentalist women to the fore. This is a significant step in the right direction, and Freitag should be given credit for that. Flutur Troshani Department of English and American Studies University of Shkoder “Luigj Gurakuqi” Shkoder, Albania