May 8th: Kate Zambreno—Heroines (New Edition)
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Kate Zambreno in Conversation with Philo Cohen to discuss her book Heroines (New Edition) (Semiotext(e), 2024)
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Wednesday, May 8th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will be streamed directly on this page. A recording will be archived.
Kate Zambreno—Heroines (New Edition), Introduction by Jamie Hood - Published by Semiotext(e) 2024
A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade.
I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.
On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called "Frances Farmer Is My Sister," arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.
In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the “minor,” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. “ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,” writes Zambreno. “When he does, it's existential.” With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.
Photo credit Heather Sten
Kate Zambreno is the author of many books, most recently of The LIght Room, as well as Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar. Heroines was recently reissued by Semiotext(e). Forthcoming is Animal Stories from Transit Books. Zambreno is at work on a book of fiction entitled Foam.
Philo Cohen is an artist, curator, archivist, and publisher based in Brooklyn. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in Art History and Comparative Literature. Over the years, Cohen has worked as a curatorial assistant and archivist in various institutions in New York, Tokyo and Paris. She has over ten years of experience assisting artists in the development of their work, organization of their archive, and communication with public and private collections. In 2024, Cohen will be curating the first solo exhibition of French artist and filmmaker Éléonore, Safe Travel at Justine Kurland Studio as well as editing a boxset of curated entries from This Long Century’s archive amongst other projects.