Dissonant aesthetics: The stakes of experience in the Modernist avant-garde (Theodor W. Adorno)

The concept of experience has been a key notion in discussions of women's literature for several decades. Many feminist scholars have seen the notion of experience as the site where women's narratives about themselves could pose powerful counters to a literary tradition which is dominated by men both in terms of who told the tales and how those tales were told. If women could tell personal tales of their experience, it would provide an arena where women could reveal themselves as they saw themselves, in opposition to being talked about by male writers. Indeed, much important work has been done in recovering women's experience in the name of providing a counter-sphere. However, one effect of conceiving of experience as a testimony of the truth of women's lives has been an avoidance of reading avant-garde narratives (and poetry) by women because they don't overtly testify to a personal experience which can then be reasonably juxtaposed to men's narratives. My project suggests that there is a different mode of experience that is inherited through Theodor Adorno which allows us to see not only how experience might be understood differently and therefore supply us with a method for reading women's writing in the Modernist avant-garde movements, but attending to these women's texts also affords us the opportunity to flesh out Adorno's theory of experience. Specifically, reading how these women invested aesthetic experience with a notion of a bodily subject allows us to see how the body might be reinvestigated in Adorno. Because I am concerned with aesthetic experience, and the Modernist avant-garde movements (Vorticism, Futurism, and Surrealism in this case) are characterized as aesthetic moments when men founded a specific they are the perfect site for excavating how women within these movements secured a different kind of aesthetic experience away from the men who founded the movement. Further, I take the term dissonance as a register of this conflicted relationship between the female experiencing subject and the male avant-garde aesthetic.