Kaye Mitchell

The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading

On 20 February 1969, Panther Books (in association with Secker and Warburg) published B. S. Johnson’s new novel, The Unfortunates. This ‘book in a box’, as it would become known, featured twenty-seven individually bound and paginated chapters collected in a box, with only the first and last chapters identified as such; the intervening sections could thus be rearranged by the reader and read in any order they chose. Such formal experimentation was not unique—as several writers on Johnson, including Jonathan Coe, have acknowledged, the author was almost certainly aware of Marc Saporta’s entirely loose-leaved novel, Composition No. 1 (translated from French into English in 1963)—nevertheless, the format of The Unfortunates has afforded it no little notoriety, acclaim and commentary over the years.

Self-abuse: the pornography of postmodern life in Money

The intense and divisive debates about pornography within feminism constitute one important context for understanding Money. In addition to situating the novel in this particular context, this article considers how pornography emerges in the novel as a dominant mode of understanding and engaging with the ‘twentieth century’, with the city, with masculinity, with America, and, above all, with an inflated, hyperbolic, self-conscious consumerism that is held to be typical of late capitalism. Pornography also serves to infect and inflect the very style of the novel. The article concludes by reading Money in the present context of discussions about the ‘pornification’ of culture, a development that the novel appears to anticipate if not, necessarily, to critique.

FERAL WITH VULNERABILITY

Abstract This brief meditation on Maggie Nelsons The Argonauts reads it as elaborating a politics and ethics of vulnerability in both its thinking and its formal qualities, thereby showing us the radical aesthetic, personal and political potential of this state of apparent unguardedness. I consider, in turn, the texts treatment of emotional vulnerability (being undone by others), physical vulnerability (the pregnable, penetrable, in-transition, mortal body), the vulnerability of gender (its precariousness) and our vulnerability to gender (our need to pass, sometimes), as well as the vulnerabilities of the apparently confessional writer and of the text itself (its radical intertextuality).

Who Is She? Identities, Intertextuality and Authority in Non-Fiction Lesbian Pulp of the 1950s

For a brief period in the 1950s and early 1960s, the subgenre of lesbian pulp fiction enjoyed enormous success in the US and, to a lesser degree, the UK, with works by the likes of Ann Bannon, Vin Packer and March Hastings selling millions of copies and spawning numerous series and imitations.1 This chapter turns its attention to a related, but less famous, textual archive: the non-fiction lesbian pulp of this period — what we might term ‘pulp sexology’ — which exists on a continuum with mass market pulp fiction and ‘proper’ postwar sexology and which seems as significant for the history of lesbianism as the better-known (and arguably more easily recuperable) pulp fictions. In the 1950s, non-fiction pulps allowed current and contentious discourses about sexuality (particularly ‘taboo’ sexualities such as lesbianism) to be disseminated in a highly marketable, highly accessible format. Reading these texts now offers insights into an era that was less conservative and censorious -or at least more conflicted — than it is usually represented as being, as evidenced by its appetite for the new, the scandalous and the shocking (an appetite that pulp avidly stimulated and supplied). As Michelle Ann Abate argues, the existence of pulps suggests ‘that the 1950s was also a decade of dissident desires and alternative value systems’.2 Reading non-fiction pulps also reveals the significance of sexuality as a major focus of epistemological enquiry, alarmist fantasy and political paranoia in this period, and the significance of the 1950s as a crucial decade in the development of sexual knowledge and forms of sexual regulation.