How Soon Is Now: Constructing the Contemporary / Gendering the Experimental

Abstract

“Three words. Three difficulties.” In this way Christine Brooke-Rose reflected on the condition of being an ‘experimental woman writer’ in her essay “Illiterations”, published in Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’s landmark collection, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989). To these three ‘difficulties’ we may now add a fourth: the contemporary. What is ‘the contemporary’? Where does it begin and when will it end? What is the value of the contemporary as a historicising concept? What are the uses of the contemporary as a marketing category? What are the implications of the contemporary for the visibility – or otherwise – of experimental writing by women authors? This article will seek to provide some frameworks for thinking critically about the construction of contemporary literary fiction. With a focus on the emerging profile of Chris Kraus, an American writer, film-maker and academic whose non-fiction novels combine life writing, art theory and critical reflections on neo-liberal economics and post 9/11 politics, it will examine the convergence of some distinctive enabling conditions for contemporary experimental women’s writing: a mutually supporting proximity between academia and experimental writing; a relatively autonomous network of production and reception; and an understanding of writing as an art practice rather than a branch of literary production. The article will suggest that the ‘contemporary’ should be understood as more than a mere marker of the present; it will argue that the ‘difficulties’ prompted by the contemporary as a category of literary analysis can be seen as productive for reflecting on the history and future of women’s writing.