Project Statement

by J. Drucker

Narratology takes up the themes of women and narrative that are one of the ongoing topics in my books. The text was originally written in a single Puss in Boots notebook given to me by Gino Lee. The outline of genres on the title page was inspired by receipt of a postcard in the mail with the question, "Would you like to write for money?" The solicitation was from a pulp fiction house whose genres were, as listed -- Historical romance, Sweet romance, and so on, through Glitz. The book was an exercise on interweaving versions of my own history, fantasy, imagined projections through tales and texts read and studied over the years. The opening statement in the book states the project very clearly, "The stories according to which the possibilities of living a life gained access to the psychic theater staging the imaginary events as real." The counter statement that intercuts with this completes the premise: "A narratological bias against the truth upstages the ordinary offerings of supposedly lived experience, polluting the psychological atmosphere with all the smokescreen pleasures of received knowledge. The fantasmatic projection onto the real plays out its lines with all the seductive facility of tales told in the tabloids – signifying everything." I was keenly interested in countering claims of authenticity being put forth as the "lived" against the theories of constructed meaning lived in the symbolic. The 1990s were a fraught moment for theory, and theoretical feminism was coming particularly under attack by reactionary approaches to lived experience.

Narratology

Johanna Drucker

Agents

Johanna Drucker

type: initiating

role:
artist
author
designer

nationality:
born: United States
active: United States
citizenship: United States

dates:
birth: 1952-05-30

Publication Information

publisher: self-published

dates:
production: 1991-00-00:1994-00-00
publication: 1994-00-00

Aesthetic Profile

movement:
unknown

subject:
artists' books (LCSH)

themes: The narratives that provide form and shape to women's experience. [J. Drucker]

content form:
narrative (local)
experimental text (local)

publication tradition:
artists' book (local)

related works: Simulant Portrait, Against Fiction, and A Girl's Life are quite strongly related. [J. Drucker]

other influences: Images from illustrated novels and pulp fiction. [J. Drucker]

community: none [J. Drucker]