The Pink Guitar
Writing as Feminist Practice
SERIES:
Modern and Contemporary Poetics
University of Alabama Press
An influential feminist study of poetry and writing
The Pink Guitar is a landmark study of women's writing and poetics—and representations of women artists—in the 20th century. It probes the work of H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp, among others, and includes DuPlessis’s pioneering essay “For the Etruscans,” described in American Literature as “one of the finest pieces of criticism in the feminist literary tradition.”
'With the dazzling, sometimes breathtaking The Pink Guitar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has produced one of the boldest, most enlightening, innovative, challenging, and knowledgeable works of feminist theory to grace the last couple of decades.' —Martha Nell Smith, Tulsa, Studies in Women’s Literature
‘This is one of the most pleasurable works of criticism I have read in years. These essays fuse disparate voices, colloquial, theoretical, autobiographical. They intercut DuPlessis’s own words with those of other writers and poets. They draw together aspects of being usually sundered in criticism, without imposing systems or closure.’ —Helen Carr, New Formations
‘Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have, for years, imagined a feminine language. Here DuPlessis comes very close to inventing one. . . . She [creates] not only a style of writing but also a practice of reading that is uniquely her own.’ —Cecilia Farr, American Literature
‘The supreme quality of The Pink Guitar is how insightfully and thoroughly DuPlessis understands the ways that gender relations are embedded within signifying practices--and how a feminist writing practice must disrupt these practices on multiple levels. . . . The Pink Guitar establishes a powerful feminist writing practice not because of DuPlessis’s refusal of authority, transcendence, and singularity, but because of the ways she redeploys these.’ —Jeanne Heuving, Contemporary Literature
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic, and Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author/editor of more than 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, including The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934.
