| dc.description.abstract | When literary critics approach highly experimental works, we are confronted with a problem: it is not clear to us what the work means. Readers of such work often find themselves bereft. We don’t know what to do when we open a book and find texts like the one reproduced on the front cover of Reading Experimental Writing, from Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014). We are used to working hard, yes, but we expect that at some point it will become clear to us what the work means. When it does not, we imagine that the problem is outside of us. Despite decades-long debates about the death of the author, we feel her absence: the author has not offered us a clear path. But what has she offered? In this chapter, I argue that the hyphenated relation between writer and reader called for by Bergvall’s practice models what we can do when we find ourselves in the dark, when meaning is unclear, when we don’t know how to find our way. To make this argument, I draw on Jessica Benjamin who argues, in The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988), that in the mother-child bond we find an alternative theory of the production of meaning. In describing an experience of ‘recognition’ that ‘entails the paradox that “you” who are “mine” are also different, new, outside of me’ (Benjamin, Bonds, 15), the mother-child relation also offers an affective theory of the reception of experimental work, since such work offers spaces where readers can also become ‘different, new.’ | en_US |
