„Nie ma nic lepszego niż teoria.” Kilka uwag o praktyce teoretycznej współczesnych awangardowych pisarek amerykańskich
“There is nothing better than a theory”: A few remarks on the theoretical practice of contemporary avantgarde women writers

Summary/Abstract: The essay discusses theoretical practices of three major American experimental women writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Carla Harryman, who played a crucial role in shaping the present-day critical and theoretical literary debate regarding the status of formally radical literature engaged in questions of feminist epistemology and written by women. Devoted to language and its ideological dimension, their work is based on a wager that poetic practice is a socially engaged strategy of intervention (Harryman), and as such functions as a language-oriented feminist epistemology. Hejinian, Scalapino, and Harryman created a significant literary and theoretical body of work that includes complex genre-bending hybrid texts deeply rooted in contemporary feminist discourses and preoccupied with such issues as production of knowledge, meaning, identity, gender, and sexuality, hidden ideological mechanisms of the conventional narrative, and the imperative of its constant refiguration. The article is also an attempt to see their work in a broader context of feminist thought, ranging from écriture féminine, through Judith Butler’s and Denise Riley’s critiques of identity politics, to the posthumanist horizon of Donna Haraway’s cyborg writing.

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