The Literary Workshop

Radical lesbian feminist theorist and author Monique Wittig theorizes writing as labor and demonstrates where literature’s political power comes from

Monique Wittig was a paradigm-shifting force in the second-wave feminist movement of both the United States and France, and recognized as one of the most brilliant authors of her generation. In this book, she takes the reader inside her literary workshop, showing writing to be a material practice and real labor.

Wittig diagnosed the "straight mind" of Western culture as both heterosexual and misogynist. Her challenge to sexual and gender oppression, along with her philosophical critique of mind-body dualisms, established her as a core thinker in the canon of feminist theory and made possible the field of queer feminism.

Wittig is part of a constellation of writers who revolutionized French literature, such as Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Georges Perec, who all departed from the conventional realism of the nineteenth century in order to invent distinctly twentieth-century modes of writing the world.  

In The Literary Workshop, Wittig, often bifurcated into either a theorist or an author, provides a complete account of how she thinks the literary and the political together than that of The Straight Mind. Wittig reveals the secret of her craft, showing how the work a writer does with language is at the heart of the political.