In “The Argonauts,” the poet and critic Maggie Nelson recalls an art history seminar she attended with the scholars Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. That, at least, is the traditional binary, though the assumptions behind it are pervasive even among those who otherwise stand in opposition to the traditional and the mainstream.

Mothers are allowed some authority when it comes to their homes, their children and their bodies their domain is one of domestic necessity, which is supposed to stand in mute contrast to the wider world of work, of ideas, of rationality, of free will. Yet actual mothering is accorded little social or economic value beyond hazy reverence and pious declarations. “The most important job in the world” is such a sentimental truism that even women who don’t want to have children report having to explain themselves to incredulous busybodies. She currently lives in Los Angeles.To become a mother is to learn, among many other things, that mothers are treated as both central and peripheral to American culture. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney.

She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005 finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011 a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009 named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007 reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson