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Although Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century authors writing in German, her novels and stories have sometimes been viewed narrowly as portraits of women as victims. In this innovative study, Sara Lennox provides a much broader perspective on Bachmann's work, at the same time undertaking an experiment in feminist methodology. Lennox examines Bachmann's poetry and prose in historical context, arguing that the varied feminist interpretations of her writings are the result of shifts in theoretical emphases over a period of more than three decades. Lennox then places her own essays on Bachmann in similar perspective, showing how each piece reflects the historical moment in which it was written. Making use of recent interdisciplinary approaches—Foucauldian theories of sexuality, post-colonial theory, materialist feminism—she explores the extent to which each of her earlier readings was shaped by the methods employed, the questions asked, and the political issues that seemed most germane at the time. Out of this analysis comes a new understanding of the significance of Bachmann's work and new insight into the theory and practice of feminist criticism.

A collection of essays using Gloria Anzaldúa’s archival works to further explore and reassess the meaning of her legacy.

In the 1980s, Gloria Anzaldúa’s pioneering Borderlands/La Frontera and This Bridge Called My Back created new and durable trajectories for feminist, queer, Latinx, and postcolonial thought. Still, much of her writing was never published. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s impressive archive—manuscript drafts, personal memorabilia, correspondence, and drawings held at the Benson Collection at the University of Texas, Austin—this volume explores what we are still learning from a pathbreaking scholar more than twenty years after her death.

Changing Our Minds with Gloria Anzaldúa gathers essays from eleven writers working in diverse fields, including philosophy, literature, geography, performance studies, and visual arts. All have been powerfully influenced by Anzaldúa, and after examining her archives, all came to know her work anew. Each chapter relates discoveries among the unpublished materials, illuminating Anzaldúa’s celebrated texts and raising novel questions. A meditation, as well, on archivalism itself, Changing Our Minds reckons with the power of dusty papers to motivate new generations of readers outside the geographies and academic departments in which Anzaldúa has long been a fixture.

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.