Take 12: A Critical Performance

Abstract

As a text whose first incarnation was a group performance staged at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, this critical performance piece explores the aesthetics of the figures of the white screen and white ink as they play through the prose work of Nicole Brossard and Hélène Cixous, the films and plays of Marguerite Duras, and the films of Agnès Varda. As both text and context, this piece urges us to consider the ways that innovative scholarship pushes the boundaries of the printed page. The traditional abstract included here is merely a content teaser and, we hope, reads ironically against the innovative critical work that follows. If you wish to read more about the process by which this author undertook writing this essay, as well as the critical stakes of its production, please see the introduction to the volume as well as the accompanying anti-abstract at the close of the chapter.