Reading and writing in kristjana gunnars’s rose garden

Abstract

Focusing primarily on Gunnars’s later hybrid novels Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust and The Prowler, Quynn sketches her own acts of reading as perverse, mistaken, hostile, fickle, disordered, and always loving engagements with story and self. Drawing on what she argues is the proliferative logic of Gunnars’s explosive self-reflexive moves, Quynn’s essay invites readers into a dynamic textual series of (re)visionings of woman-as-scholar, woman-as reader, and considers the ways such critical acts of reading may be engaged, enactive, delightfully incomplete, and critically out-of-order. The traditional abstract included here is merely a content teaser and, we hope, reads ironically against the innovative critical work that follows. If you wish to read more about the process by which this author undertook writing this essay, as well as the critical stakes of its production, please see the introduction to the volume as well as the accompanying anti-abstract at the close of the chapter.