A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Published during the 1990s, these essays are united through a common methodological engagement—writing that recounts a personal anecdote and then attempts to read that anecdote for the theoretical insights it affords. Gallop addresses many of the major questions of feminist theory, regularly revisiting not only ‘70s feminism, but also poststructuralism and the academy, for, as Gallop explains, the practice of anecdotal theory derives from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism. Whether addressing issues of pedagogy, the sexual position one occupies when on the academic job-market, bad-girl feminists, or the notion of sisterhood, these essays exemplify theory grappling with its own erotics, theory connected to the real. They are bold, illuminating, and—dare we say—fun.
Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.
Beyond Feminist Aesthetics has a dual focus. First, Rita Felski gives a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and second, she offers an analysis of contemporary fiction by women, drawing in particular on the genres of the autobiographical confession and the novel of self-discovery, in order to show that this literature raises questions for feminism that cannot be answered in terms of a purely gender based analysis.
Felski argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a nonissue that feminists have needlessly pursued; she suggests, in contrast, that it is impossible to speak of “masculine” and “feminine,” “subversive” and “reactionary” literary forms in isolation from the social conditions of their production and reception. The political value of such works of literature from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context. This leads her to argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory, and to develop such an approach by drawing upon the model of a feminist counter-public sphere.
Rita Felski has produced a closely reasoned, stimulating book that creates a new framework for discussing the relationship between literature and feminist politics. It will interest students and teachers of women’s studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and fiction.
The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading—personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and always political—and how the act itself brought a host of women, each with their own history with the movement, into relation, and into a belief in that relation. The value given to reading can be seen in the ways feminists pursued media representation; in consciousness-raising (CR) groups including shared reading in their meetings; in women opening bookstores, developing newsletters, establishing journals, and starting presses; and in corporate publishers pursuing feminist fiction.
Closely and Consciously crisscrosses distinct print spheres, including newsletters and periodicals produced by feminist cells and consciousness-raising groups, feminist presses seeking to articulate their visions for women’s writing, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in first-time monographs and newly established journals, personal and editorial correspondence, press records, and the publishing histories of bestsellers that testified to the increasingly broad popularity of women’s writing. Uniting all these disparate activists and media outlets, and providing crucial relationality, was reading. With a mix of close readings and archival research, Wu unpacks and interprets this central act of reading and why it matters during a crucial moment of feminist history.
Dialogics of the Oppressed was first published in 1992. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Formulated within and against the context of Russian formalism that became the backbone of semiotics, Mikhail Bakhtin's work has enabled contemporary critical theories to return to specific sociopolitical and historical moments that had been closed off by formalist abstractions. In Dialogics of the Oppressed, Peter Hitchcock looks through the lens of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism for an analysis of subaltern writing. Rather than assume an integral "subaltern subject" as the object of analysis, Hitchcock - in case studies of four global feminists, Nawal el Saadawi, Pat Barker, Zhang Jie, and Agnes Smedley - emphasizes the cultural agency of the subaltern and shows the political implications this agency might have for literary analysis in general and cultural studies in particular.
"Presents a provocative set of readings-through the Bakhtinian model of dialogism-of texts by four women writers of the twentieth century. . . instructive and compelling." Barbara Harlow, University of Texas
Dialogics of the Oppressed argues from an internationalistic perspective to underline that the heterogeneity of dialogic feminism itself constitutes a significant array of discursive resistance to the hegemony of disciplines and so-called area studies operative in the metropolitan First World academy. Hitchcock demonstrates through dialogic analyses of the writings of these four feminists that a form of multicultural materialism can itself disrupt the restrictive logics and practices of literary studies in the Western academy, and that indeed, there is a counterlogic in the culture of the subaltern. Hitchcock's underlying objective is the development of a powerful critique of the epistemological bases of the academy that marginalize and devalorize certain cultural productions and subjects, as well as a cognitive mapping of the politics of pedagogy in current transformations of disciplinarity.
Peter Hitchcock is professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice and has published essays on radical writing, multiculturalism, film, and Third World fiction.
A Dialogue of Voices was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his notions of dialogics and genre, has had a substantial impact on contemporary critical practices. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to the possibilities and challenges Bakhtin presents to feminist theory, the task taken up in A Dialogue of Voices. The original essays in this book combine feminism and Bakhtin in unique ways and, by interpreting texts through these two lenses, arrive at new theoretical approaches. Together, these essays point to a new direction for feminist theory that originates in Bakhtin-one that would lead to a feminine être rather than a feminine écriture.
Focusing on feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig in conjunction with Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope, the authors offer close readings of texts from a wide range of multicultural genres, including nature writing, sermon composition, nineteenth-century British women's fiction, the contemporary romance novel, Irish and French lyric poetry, and Latin American film. The result is a unique dialogue in which authors of both sexes, from several countries and different eras, speak against, for, and with one another in ways that reveal their works anew as well as the critical matrices surrounding them.Karen Hohne is an independent scholar and artist living in Moorhead, Minnesota. Helen Wussow is an assistant professor of English at Memphis State University.
Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change that discerns interconnections among all forms of oppression: the exploitation of nature, the oppression of women, class exploitation, racism, colonialism. Against binary divisions such as self/other, culture/nature, man/woman, humans/animals, and white/non-white, ecofeminist theory asserts that human identity is shaped by more fluid relationships and by an acknowledgment of both connection and difference.
Once considered the province of philosophy and women's studies, ecofeminism in recent years has been incorporated into a broader spectrum of academic discourse. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism assembles some of the most insightful advocates of this perspective to illuminate ecofeminism as a valuable component of literary criticism.
Now, at the dawn of a new century of thought and action, it is important once again to revisit the canon of feminist literary criticism and theory and re-establish the measure for representing the latest developments in the field. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.
Feminisms Redux, presented in a concise format, includes many essays from the second edition that continue to speak to current concerns and also provides readers with new contributions that address work in postcolonial studies, queer theory, and disability studies. As in the earlier volumes, the editors have gathered the full text of original articles and book chapters, with no edited excerpts. The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women. More than a revision of archetypal work, Feminisms Redux represents the dawning of a new classic.
Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passé, feminism today seems becalmed without being calm. This is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture--yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In fresh readings of a wide array of texts--legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical--renowned literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point.
Employing surprising juxtapositions, The Feminist Difference looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective; at poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's rich, stimulating, unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--moments that re-emerge here as sources of a revitalized critical awareness.
In the final analysis, Johnson argues, literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book literature appears not as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.
The first book-length investigation of a pioneering English professor and theorist at Vassar College, A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck explores Buck’s contribution to the fields of education and rhetoric during the Progressive Era. By contextualizing Buck’s academic and theoretical work within the rise of women’s educational institutions like Vassar College, the social and political movement toward suffrage, and Buck’s own egalitarian political and social ideals, Suzanne Bordelon offers a scholarly and well-informed treatment of Buck’s achievements that elucidates the historical and contemporary impact of her work and life.
Bordelon argues that while Buck did not call herself a feminist, she embodied feminist ideals by demanding the full participation of her female students and by challenging power imbalances at every academic, social, and political level.
A Feminist Legacy reveals that Vassar College is an undervalued but significant site in the history of women’s argumentation and pedagogy. Drawing on a rich variety of archival sources, including previously unexamined primary material, A Feminist Legacy traces the beginnings of feminist theories of argumentation and pedagogy and their lasting legacy within the fields of education and rhetoric.
Despite pronouncements by many theorists about the difficulty—even the impossibility—of doing justice in a single study to both history and form, Feminist Narrative Ethics proves that they can be mutually illuminating. Its approach is not only resolutely rhetorical, but resolutely historical as well. It strikes a felicitous balance between history and form that affords new understanding of the implied author concept.
Feminist Narrative Ethics makes a persuasive case for the necessity of locating authorial agency in the implied (rather than the actual) author and cogently explains why rhetorical theory insists on the concept of an implied (rather than an inferred) author. And it proposes a new facet of agency that rhetorical theorists have heretofore neglected: the ethics of progressive revisions to a project in manuscript.
Moving back and forth between a critique of modern discourses on Heian literature and close analyses of the Heian texts themselves, Yoda sheds light on some of the most persistent interpretive models underwriting Japanese literary studies, particularly the modern paradigm of a masculine national subject. She proposes new directions for disciplinary critique and suggests that historicized understandings of premodern texts offer significant insights into contemporary feminist theories of subjectivity and agency.
Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume—including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim—respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior, Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass. Revealing the beliefs and formative life experiences that inform their essays, these writers characteristically recount the process by which their opinions took shape--a process as conducive to self-discovery as it is to critical insight. The result—which has been referred to as "personal writing," "experimental critical writing," or "intellectual autobiography"—maps a dramatic change in the direction of literary criticism.
Contributors. Julia Balen, Dana Beckelman, Ellen Brown, Sandra M. Brown, Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton, Suzanne Bunkers, Peter Carlton, Brenda Daly, Victoria Ekanger, Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Shirley Nelson Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Melody Graulich, Gail Griffin, Dolan Hubbard, Kendall, Susan Koppelman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Linda Robertson, Carol Taylor, Jane Tompkins, Cheryl Torsney, Trace Yamamoto, Frances Murphy Zauhar
From Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It to Michael Jackson's physical transmutations, from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to August Wilson's Fences, from male scholars' investments in feminism to white scholars' in black texts—Awkward explores cultural moments that challenge the exclusive critical authority of race and gender. In each instance he confronts the question: What do artists, scholars, and others concerned with representations of Afro-American life make of the view that gender, race, and sexuality circumscribe their own and others' lives and narratives? Throughout he demonstrates the perils and merits of the sort of "boundary crossing" this book ultimately makes: a black male feminism.
In pursuing a black male feminist criticism, Awkward's study acknowledges the complexities of interpretation in an age when a variety of powerful discourses have proliferated on the subject of racial, gendered, and sexual difference; at the same time, it identifies this proliferation as an opportunity to negotiate seemingly fixed cultural and critical positions.
Three powerful interviews with writers of different nationalities (Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, and Carmen Naranjo) introduce topics echoed in the essays that follow: the interplay between women's writing and feminist theory, the politics of writing, and the roles of race, class, and sexual orientation in artistic production. These issues are engaged on a theoretical level by three essays that represent today's most prominent areas of concern for feminist literary criticism. The theoretical perspectives advanced in this anthology provide models for reading the traditional expressions of women worldwide including oratory and performance as well as literature in the more conventional sense.
Contributors include Jane Flax on "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory," Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham on "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Paula Bennett on "Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory," Leslie Rabine on "Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston," Joyce Zonana on "Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre," Jane Desmond on "Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's 'Radha' of 1906," Terri Brint Joseph on "Poetry as a Strategy of Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women," Chikwenye Ogunyemi on "The Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," and Sandra Zagarell on "Narrative of Community."
This collection is especially appropriate for scholars and students of feminist literary criticism, women's studies, English, and ethnic studies.
Essays were originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Becoming a mother profoundly alters one’s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth. Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens.
Although both male and female rhetors employ motherhood to promote themselves and their agendas, Buchanan argues it is particularly slippery terrain for women—on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of Motherhood investigates that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and performance of the Mother in American public discourse, tracing its use and impact in three case studies, and by theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourses work to women’s benefit or detriment. In the process, the reader encounters a fascinating array of issues—including birth control, civil rights, and abortion—and rhetors, ranging from Diane Nash and Margaret Sanger to Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama.
As Buchanan makes clear, motherhood is a rich site for investigating the interrelationships among gender, power, and public discourse. Her latest book contributes to the discipline of rhetoric by attending to and making a convincing case for the significance of this understudied subject. With its examination of timely controversies, contemporary and historical figures, and powerful women, Rhetorics of Motherhood will appeal to a wide array of readers in rhetoric, communications, American studies, women’s studies, and beyond.
With a recurring focus on how his mother’s tragic weaknesses and her compelling strengths affected his development, Awkward intersperses the chronologically arranged autobiographical sections with ruminations on his own interests in literary and cultural criticism. As a male scholar who has come under fire for describing himself as a feminist critic, he reflects on such issues as identity politics and the politics of academia, affirmative action, and the Million Man March.
By connecting his personal experiences with larger political, cultural, and professional questions, Awkward uses his life as a palette on which to blend equations of race and reading, urbanity and mutilation, alcoholism, pain, gender, learning, sex, literature, and love.
This engaging study begins by looking at the eighteenth century, when critical writing started to assume the institutional and generic structures we associate with it today, and examines a series of case studies that illuminate how women writers engaged with the forms of intellectual sociability that defined nineteenth-century criticism—including critical dialogue, the club, the salon, and the publishing firm. In doing so, it clarifies the fascinating rhetorical and political debates surrounding the figure of the female critic and charts how women writers worked both within and against professional communities. Ultimately, Stern contends that gender was a formative influence on critical practice from the very beginning, presenting the history of criticism as a history of gender politics.
While firmly grounded in literary studies, The Social Life of Criticism combines an attention to historical context with a deep investment in feminist scholarship, social theory, and print culture. The book promises to be of interest not only to professional academics and graduate students in nineteenth-century literature but also to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including literature, intellectual history, cultural studies, gender theory, and sociology.
In her analysis, Lurie traces each author’s strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.
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