The Pink Guitar

"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