Endorsements

This collection experiments with new styles of cultural criticism and explores how academics might write in more engaging ways. Sometimes more personally, sometimes more poetically, the chapters in this book all express the desire to write otherwise. Reworking forms such as the memoir, family history and ethnography, these essays engage readers directly and immediately in questions of narration, representation and ethics. Leading figures in their field, including Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, step outside their usual ways of writing to explore how their academic concerns might be more imaginatively articulated. Contributions move beyond conventional academic writing and into more exploratory registers to consider subjects such as: feminist collaborations, memories of dislocation, movement and belonging, intimacy and affect, encountering difference, passionate connections to art and opera. Some chapters use personal writing to interrogate theoretical issues; others put conceptual questions next to therapeutic ones; all of them offer the reader new ways of thinking about how and why we write, and how we might do it differently. Discovering the creative spaces in between traditional genres, many of the chapters show how new styles of writing open up new ways of doing cultural criticism. This book will be of interest to readers across the humanities disciplines and in the interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies, gender studies and visual studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in writing and culture.