Introduction

Prologue: Playing and Modernity

Pleasures of Theory
Metapolylogue: On Playing and Modernity

A Double Margin: Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France

Of Margins and Avant-Gardes
The Surrealist Subject
Women in the History of Surrealism

Aggressions and Counteraggressions: Readability in Avant-Garde Fiction

Reading and Rupture
Robbe-Grillet, or, the Readability of Transgression
Maurice Roche: Paradigm Lost and Found
Self-Reflexive Afterthought

Reading Robbe-Grillet: Sadism and Text in Projet pour une révolution à New York

Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil

Pornography as Textuality
Pornography as "Reality"
Feminist Poetics and the Pornographic Imagination

Love Stories: Women, Madness, and Narrative

Mastery and Transference: The Significance of Dora
Breton, Charcot, and the Spectacle of Female Otherness
Duras/Lacan: Not Knowing as Entanglement

The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism

Equal Rights, or, Telling It with Four-Letter Words
Celebrating Difference, or, Writing (and Reading) Otherwise
Dreaming beyond the Number Two

Feminist Intertextuality and the Laugh of the Mother

Parody and Politics
Parody, Perversion, Collage: Surrealists at Play
Daughters Playing: Some Feminist Rewritings and the Mother
The Hearing Trumpet: Marian Leatherby and the Holy Grail
The Laugh of the Mother

Feminism and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending

Une Histoire Bien Postmoderne
Discourses on the Postmodern and the Emergence of Feminist Postmodernism
Opposition in Babel? The Political Status of Postmodern Intertextuality
To Market, to Market: Oppositional Art in Mass Culture
Of Cyborgs and (Other) "Women": The Politics of Decentered Subjects

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index