Thinking Environments of Their Own: (Re)Reading the Page-Spaces Created by Experimental Women Writers From 1990-Present Day

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'A book should have enough air and space so whoever enters can breathe'-Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This thesis argues that contemporary experimental women writers create visually nuanced page-spaces that redefine the role of reading in a computational and digitised world and question its relationship with feminist politics. This project demonstrates how DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, Maggie Nelson, and Sara Ahmed design visual, linguistic and interactive structures that give readers a space to experiment with modes of intellectual, affective or aesthetic engagement. Like Ahmed's feminist toolkit, their texts provide activities or 'points of interaction' (Emerson, 2014) for readers: they are interfaces, guiding readerly responses and presenting customisable structures. I argue these authors produce thinking environments that diagrammatically influence reader response and appear to choreograph thoughts (Manning, 2009) via a heavy reliance on footnotes, lists and incomplete figures that promote collaboration between reader and writer as feminist praxis. This research extends existing work on the interrelations between digital culture, contemporary literature and feminism (Hayles, 2005; Odin, 2010) by focussing on non-fiction rather than its often-considered fictional counterparts. It makes an original contribution to discussions of interfaces by exploring how literary equivalents are providing readers with spaces to learn skills that can then be used in political settings. My chosen authors are interested in the proposition that texts (online and off) can encourage certain social behaviours or practices that can be taken up "IRL" for feminist ends. Applying pressure to the notion that 'political-aesthetic-feminist writing' is a space for 'practical thinking-in-writing' (DuPlessis, 2006), I argue their page-spaces are practice-grounds for readers to explore the role of their actions within larger social structures and networks. With an emphasis on authorial mirroring of communications made via social media, I argue they challenge the need for feminist spaces in ways reflecting the changing technological and textual materialities at their disposal (Gitelman, 2014; Drucker, 2014; Kirschenbaum, 2016). Chapter 1, DuPlessis' Pensive Spaces, explores The Pink Guitar (1990) and Blue Studios (2006) to establish the critical parameters of 'thinking environments' by presenting examples from DuPlessis' feminist essays that encourage readerly engagement. Engaging the challenge of capturing thought, Ch.2-Hejinian's Timely Thoughts-analyses The Language of Inquiry (2000) and explores annotation methods. Ch.3, Robertson's Visual Thinking, investigates Nilling (2012) alongside Susanna Berger's discussion of visual thinking (Berger, 2017) to explore Robertson's pages as textual diagrams of spatialised knowledge requiring readers to move between text-body and footnote; paper and web pages. Ch.4, Nelson's Community, engages the marginal citations in The Argonauts (2015) which populate otherwise empty spaces to argue Nelson provides the infrastructure for an alternative relationship between readers and cited figures. Employing Ahmed's critique of feminism as homework, Ch.5 compares the reading experience of Living a Feminist Life (2017) with Ahmed's blog, feministkilljoy.com.