Reading Vulnerability in the Novels of Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Kathy Acker

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This project argues for the contemporary relevance of a poetics and politics of vulnerability, via a comparativereading of three key female literary experimentalists of the twentieth century: Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Ann Quin(1936-1873) and Kathy Acker (1947-1997). It contends that their diverse formal innovations anticipate and nuancethe concerns and concepts of more recent theorizations of vulnerability in the spheres of law, politics, andphilosophy. It seeks to develop a theory of vulnerability that goes beyond the recognition of subversive content andworks instead as a method to rethink the history and theory of gender politics.The key research questions underpinning the proposed project are:- What are the meanings of 'vulnerability' as a 'condition of responsiveness' (Ahmed, 2016: 485), and howmight recent theorizations of the politics of vulnerability be translated into a literary-critical context?- How do particular texts by Kavan, Quin, and Acker depict 'perform' and enact vulnerability on a textuallevel, through formal strategies of appropriation, cut-up, fragmentariness and autofictionalexperimentation? How do these strategies foreground 'responsiveness' and 'permeability'? How do theirthematic concerns unpick gendered experiences of vulnerability?- What can comparative analyses of these three authors, by way of this throughline of vulnerability, tell usabout their individual literary projects, fraught relationships to feminism and diverse legacies?- How might an international framework be used to explore the connections between psychic, linguistic, andgeographic displacement in these three authors' texts? How might these forms of displacement reflect andrefract vulnerability as a literary-political practice?- How might innovative literary practices serve to nuance vulnerability theory as a critical paradigm andgender-political strategy?