1. The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Quotes
2. The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Analysis
3. The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Reviews
4. Maggie Nelson Interview

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of 'autotheory' offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and 'family.' Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is. (2016, April 10). A review of the Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Paperback, 160, ISBN-13: 9351 Cooke, V. From micro to macro: Anecdote and citation in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Sydney, Australia: The University of Sydney Feigel, L. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review – A radical approach to genre.

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship,^[1] a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship,^[2] a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry,^[3] and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Life and career[edit]

Nelson was born in 1973 and grew up in the Bay Area.^[4] She moved to Connecticut in 1990, to study English at Wesleyan University, where she was taught by Annie Dillard.^[5] After college, she lived in New York City, where she trained as a dancer, worked at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and studied informally with writer Eileen Myles. In 1998, she enrolled in a graduate program, obtaining a Ph.D. in English Literature in 2004 at the CUNY Graduate Center.^[5] Whilst at there she studied with Wayne Koestenbaum and Eve Sedgewick, among others.^[5] She left New York in 2005 to take up a teaching job at the California Institute of the Arts.^[4]

Nelson is the author of several critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and poetry. She also writes frequently on art, including essays on artists Sarah Lucas,^[6]Matthew Barney,^[7]Carolee Schneemann,^[8]A. L. Steiner,^[9]Kara Walker,^[10] and Rachel Harrison.^[11]

Nelson has taught about writing, critical theory, art, aesthetics, and literature, at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Wesleyan University, Pratt Institute of Arts, and CalArts. Currently she is a Professor of English at USC.

The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Quotes

Nelson is married to the artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered.^[4] They live with their family in Los Angeles.

Books[edit]

The Argonauts (2015) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism^[12] and was a New York Times best-seller. It is a work of 'autotheory', offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.^[13] In the memoir, Nelson documents the changes in her body throughout pregnancy with her son, Iggy, and that of Harry Dodge's body, as he takes testosterone and undergoes top surgery.^[4] Nelson has described it as reflecting 20 years of living with and learning from feminist and queer theory.

The Art of Cruelty (2011), a work of cultural, art, and literary criticism, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday Book Review of the New York Times^[14] and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.^[15] The book covers a wide range of topics, from Sylvia Plath's poetry to Francis Bacon's paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono's performance art, and offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.^[16]Bluets (2009) is an unclassifiable book of prose written in numbered segments that deals with pain, pleasure, heartbreak, and the consolations of philosophy, all through the lens of the color blue.^[17] It quickly became a cult classic, and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years.^[18]

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007) is a scholarly book about gender and Abstract Expressionism from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on the work of painter Joan Mitchell, poets Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and poets Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles.^[19] In 2008 the book was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.^[20]

The Red Parts (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005) both contend with the murder of Nelson's aunt Jane near Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969.^[21]Jane: A Murder (2005) explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related “true crime” books, and fragments from Jane's own diaries. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on sexual violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane is widely recognized as having expanded the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.^[22] It was a finalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.^[23]

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) picks up where Jane left off, offering a prose account of the trial of a new suspect in Jane's murder 36 years after the fact. Written in plain, trenchant prose reminiscent of Joan Didion, The Red Parts is a coming of age story, a documentary account of a trial, and a provocative essay interrogating the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.^[24]

Nelson's collections of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001).

Themes[edit]

Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and philosophy.

Awards and honors[edit]

• 2007 Arts Writers grant from Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.^[25]
• W.2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.^[26]
• 2015 New York Times Notable Book, The Argonauts.^[27]
• 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism), winner for Argonauts.^[28]
• 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, writer.^[29]

Bibliography[edit]

• Shiner (Hanging Loose Press, 2001). OCLC45223536
• The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003). OCLC50868215
• Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005). OCLC57506563
• The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007). OCLC71275645
• Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull, 2007). OCLC148844319
• Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). OCLC609313973
• Bluets (Wave Books, 2009). OCLC303931395
• The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). OCLC668194794
• The Argonauts (Graywolf Press 2015). OCLC889165103

References[edit]

1. ^'Maggie Nelson'. www.macfound.org.
2. ^'Maggie Nelson'. Creative Capital.
3. ^'NEA Literature Fellowships 2011, Maggie Nelson'.
4. ^ ^abcd'Maggie Nelson interview: 'People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders''. the Guardian. 2016-04-02. Retrieved 2021-03-31.
5. ^ ^abcAls, Hilton (18 April 2016). 'Immediate Family'. The New Yorker. Condé Nast. Retrieved 13 May 2020. 'She found a friendship with her instabilities and turned it immediately into questions that are dazzled, rather than narcotized,' the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, with whom Nelson studied at cuny, told me.
6. ^Nelson, Maggie. “No excuses.” In Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton eds., Sarah Lucas: au naturel. New York: New Museum, 2018.
7. ^Nelson, Maggie. “On Porousness, Perversity, and Pharmocopornographia: Matthew Barney’s OTTO Trilogy.” In Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy. New York: Gladstone Gallery, 2016.
8. ^Nelson, Maggie. “The Reënchantment of Carolee Schneemann.” The New Yorker. March 15, 2019.
9. ^Nelson, Maggie. “Puppies and Babies by A. L. Steiner.” In A.L. Steiner, Puppies & Babies, limited edition zine. Los Angeles: Otherwild.
10. ^Nelson, Maggie. “On Kara Walker,” the New School for Social Research, NYC, NY.
11. ^Nelson, Maggie. “Eighteen Theses on Rachel Harrison.” In David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman eds., Rachel Harrison life hack. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2019.
12. ^National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners for Publishing Year 2015. March 17, 2016.
13. ^https://www.amazon.com/Argonauts-Maggie-Nelson/dp/1555977359/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=WG39Y9JTDA0BGZ1BBNNK
14. ^Laura Kipnis. 'Why is Contemporary Art Addicted to Violence?' New York Times Sunday Book Review. July 14, 2011.
15. ^100 Notable Books of 2011. New York Times Sunday Book Review. November 21, 2011.
16. ^https://www.amazon.com/Art-Cruelty-Reckoning-Maggie-Nelson/dp/0393343146
17. ^https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933517409/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
18. ^Bookforum's 10 Favorites. The Oyster Review. October 2015.
19. ^https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609381092/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i6
20. ^Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship Tenth Annual Prize (2008).
21. ^'The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson review – a powerful account of family grief'. the Guardian. June 2, 2017.
22. ^'Jane by Maggie Nelson'. November 7, 2015.
23. ^'2006 Literary Awards Winners'. November 2, 2012.
24. ^'The Red Parts | Graywolf Press'. www.graywolfpress.org.
25. ^'MFA Program News and Events'. Archived from the original on November 12, 2011.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
26. ^National Endowment of the Arts 2011 Poetry FellowsArchived 2010-11-27 at the Wayback Machine
27. ^'100 Notable Books of 2015'. The New York Times. 2015-11-27. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
28. ^Alexandra Alter (March 17, 2016). ''The Sellout' Wins National Book Critics Circle's Fiction Award'. New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2016.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
29. ^'Maggie Nelson — MacArthur Foundation'. www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2016-09-22.

External links[edit]

• Media related to Maggie Nelson at Wikimedia Commons
• Maggie Nelson by AL SteinerBomb

The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Analysis

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson

2015

143 pages

The Argonauts Maggie Nelson Reviews

Review by SHAELYN SMITH

At this year’s NYC PRIDE a group of people were handing out self-published, large format, pink and black newspapers that pronounced in 212-point font “I HATE THE GAYS.” Rather than the assumed bashing a title like that would suggest, this group was instead advocating for a resurgence ofqueer—this distinction, the nuance, is something the paper then begins to dissect through a variety of manifestos, poems and expose-style articles, all written anonymously. The overarching point is that the term “gay” signifies the hetereonormative, when the fight instead should call attention to difference. Especially this year’s pride, with SCOTUS’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage coinciding almost directly with the parade, the rally seemed to lose its original intent and dissolve into a questioning of terms: what these things mean, what should or could be defined as what. These self-published papers seemed to impress upon the crowd at Friday night’s Drag March an ideology of taxonomy, and an oncology of etymology. The unity seemed inherently divisive as people began to superimpose their ideals upon the decisions of others. An older woman, after handing me a celebratory plastic flute of champagne bought from the wine store across the street and toasting, turned to my group friends again and asked, somewhat harshly, “Why are you here?”

Much attention is called to the idea of “queer”—especially under consideration of “queering the family”—in Maggie Nelson’s latest bookThe Argonauts. She questions her own family dynamic—her trans- partner, her stepchild, the son she most recently gave birth to—in a slim volume that could be categorized as an “autotheory”—a blending of criticism and memoir. Though short, it’s dense, and meandering—not unlike Nelson’s other work. Her ultimate autotelic purpose here, though, could be summed up by her own interrogation toward the middle of the text: “How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?” InThe Argonauts, Nelson doesn’t shellack over any version of reality—instead she tears away the strata of detritus and half-truths that have been layered over her own.

The recurring symbol ofargo—the displacement of the old by the new, yet retaining some idea of the thing itself, if not the same thing, it is made a new—serves as an anchor throughout the text to excavate Nelson’s truths of self, identity, relationship, love. Through patterning these accruals, Nelson intimates the impermanence of all things—that, by basis of theargonaut, these ideas and emotions we consider “truth” are constantly changing. She offers that even we ourselves are shaped of accrual: of thought, emotion, experience. By which we remember, and continue to forge ahead with myriad assessment and reassessment with varying maturity and candor the particular truths held to be self-evident.The Argonautsinvestigates this subjection to restructuring: how we come, through Nelson, to understand the propulsion of intellectual and emotional growth. The enveloping argonaut seems a perfect symbol for Nelson’s work—continually associating and abstracting itself into sheer brilliance, and genius transcendence.

She allows herself to access the dark and dirty corners of the brain—by admittances that the flooding of milk to her breast is akin to orgasm, that “age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself,” that depression and anxiety are very real things that crop up of their own accord. She talks about failure: “other moments of my life may have looked worse, but this one felt like its own kind of bottom”; she recognizes the need for recognition in these moments. She understands this is how the “snowball of a self” keeps its necessary momentum. This is how Maggie Nelson’s self-exploration unfolds, and we are lucky to be witness to it. It’s a process of needling the abject, examining from a distance, the practice of systemically and simultaneously negotiating the line between being of this world and belonging to this world. She knits out and navigates for us this Mobius strip of iterations and intentions, all the while heeding back to the binomial of the relationship to the self, which by an osmosis of power, engenders the ability to conjure and cultivate relationships with others.

*

This book serves, as least for me, as a causal nexus of necessity, following in this cultural wake of all thingsempathy, Nelson employs a startling lack of it. She doesn’t need empathy, this oft-deployed buzzword of the societal times, because here Nelson interrogates the self and investigates (step-)motherhood and catechizes feminism, all the while keeping a stakehold in the problematization of class, academia, family, art, love. She never loses sight of the so-called (queer) female experience, which everyone wants to observe, reflect upon and call witness to, but so many are afraid to claim. Here this experience is given breath, and room to breathe.

Toward the end ofThe Argonauts, Nelson breaks down the process of childbirth, of giving birth to a child, making it an action on-going, rather than a one-time symbolic event. The indefensible, unknowable, unbearable, inadmissible—these become Nelson’s stomping ground, though the only outreach she does is into the depths of theory, culling a collaboration with criticism. Nelson brings to the page with her insight and vigor, as well as a vast swath of knowledge—of art, of performance, of theory, of self. She juxtaposes the associative reflection and mediation of a memoir with the cutting inflection of art criticism, by which she saves herself from the trap of the common memoir—the snowballed tumbling into the furnace of myopia in which any truths made manifest melt into a tepid pool of self-pity. The latter a notion Nelson recognizes as all too common: “You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself, but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure begins to bear down hard upon it.” Instead, Nelson skillfully and sharply, in a sort of apogee of its type, offers an interrogation into theories and roles in shaping the truths of our lives, loves, selves. InThe Argonauts, Nelson positions herself as specimen, rather than prototype, and the resulting distances allows for an epochal honesty and integrity.

Nelson is doing something scary: she makes vulnerable the experience of the self without making it into metaphor, but rather theorizing it—forcing the intimate to be expansive, and dialing the personal to the political to the polemical without attempt to justify, or over-explain it away. For example, when she admits to and writes about her history of dappling in various addictions, she’s not trying to pedantically impart wisdom or connect with her audience as much as she is trying to discover something transcendent of the situation:

I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people’s needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, and irrational but fervent believe in my near total self-reliance.

There’s something terrifying about the sparseness and silence of honesty—an economy of language that begets the price of love. Nelson writes without pretense, and then allows us in on that secret: “That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.” But, that doesn’t mean she has it figured out, either, or that we should hold her theories to be anything other that her own truths.

Nelson says in an interview withGuenricashortly before the publication ofThe Argonauts: “I think everybody knows what it’s like to have strategic identifications throughout a day. Everybody code-switches, some people more than others. Everyone knows what it’s like to spend a day passing in certain environments.” We could see this book, then, rather than a manifesto, as a treatise of a modern era, and a necessary admission for the times, and something often overlooked—so eager are we to identify, that we forget introductions, so eager are we to assign blame that we forget to acknowledge balance; to organize that we forget origins; to envelope that we forget to encounter, to explain that we forget avowals; so insistent are we to wax theoretical that we forget to wander whimsical; so eager are we to code-source that we forget about code-switching. Nelson devises, then divulges, partway throughThe Argonautsthat even she does not intend to, but finds herself beginning to “write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” That perhaps, simply, things are not as stolid as we may like to assume—that ever present is the idea of the Argonaut: the ship perpetually re-hulling itself, the self constantly re-inventing itself, the lover constantly re-presenting herself.

In her previous books of criticism, namelyThe Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson adopts a similar voice: not cold, not icy, but indifferent—an intellectual indifference by which she finds herself capable of such mastery and meditation and awareness. The particular form of citation inThe Argonautsplays advocate to this—the text of the slim volume (appears) as contained fragments justified sections that favor the center seam, leaving space in the exterior margin for gray-font names of the authors, theorists, artists, and critics Nelson references, or quotes, denoting their speech by italics. This is breezy, but not lazy. It’s not off-putting—it shows remarkable restraint and ability by which to hold a commonplace conversation amongst these topics, so familiar they have become to her. She can meander about them with ease, therefore too eliminating the need for sections or chapters—it’s all of the same ilk and register for her. As she notes early on in the book: “I’ve explained this elsewhere. But I’m trying to say something different now.”

Maggie Nelson Interview

The Argonautsseems only a natural next step in Nelson’s oeuvre, as she’s known for an unflinching approach to the taboo, and for making that taboo something lyric, something intelligible, something enlightened—and certainly in due course as a follow up toThe Art of Cruelty, which ends on an avowal that “one of this book’s primary aims…has been making a space for paying close attention, for recognizing and articulating ambivalence, uncertainty, repulsion, and pleasure.” Nelson has here, inThe Argonauts, made that space personal—it becomes a conversation to Harry, rather than a conversation with Harry (she acknowledges ofCrueltythat “the thoughts in this book belong as much to my beloved and brilliant Harry Dodge as they do to me”). She addresses throughout a “you” that we learn to be her partner, Harry, as she contends with domesticity, love, parenting, sex, gender, class, age. And despite that direct address to an explicit second person, no audience is excluded. This memoir embodies what Cynthia Ozick cites as most crucial quality of an essay—that “she may be privately indifferent to us, but she is anything but unwelcoming. Above all, she is not a hidden principle or a thesis or a construct: she isthere, a living voice. She takes us in.” In the pages of this refreshing, much needed and invigoratingly transparent work, Nelson isthere. And she will take you in without questioning why you are there, too.