This book includes essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, well known writers such as Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker, lesser known writers such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand and Mary Ward. The contributors explore important thematic concerns: the relation between private and public realms; gender and social class; sexuality and the marketplace; and male and female cultural identity.

Three acclaimed literary critics ask: Do women construct and write fiction differently from men? They explore theoretical aspects of the feminist agenda as well as analyze their own creative procedures. Sue Roe, Susan Sellers, Nicole Ward Jouve.

Sellers explores contemporary women's rewritings of myth and fairy tale, asking why mythical paradigms continue to have such potency despite the distorted images of gender they often present. A series of readings of texts is given in illustration.

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of (...) class='Hi'>feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle, the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal (...) nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 295-313 [Access article in PDF] The Ecology of Victorian Fiction Joseph Carroll I In the past ten years or so, ecological literary criticism--that is, criticism concentrating on the relationship between literature and the natural environment--has become one of the fastest-growing areas in literary study. Ecocritics now have their own professional association, their own academic journal, and an impressive bibliography of scholarly studies. Ecocritical scholars (...) divide their attention between "nature writing" and ecological themes within all literature. In other words, some scholars write on Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard; others write on topics such as the representation of nature in romantic poetry, the American West as a symbol, metaphors of landscape, or Dante's Inferno as a polluted ecosystem. Ecocritics have a distinct subject matter, and they share in a certain broad set of attitudes, values, and public policy concerns, but they do not yet have a firmly established framework of commonly accepted theoretical principles. In the absence of any overarching theory, ecocritics have usually sought to incorporate their ecological subject matter within other, already established theoretical schools: feminism, Bakhtin's dialogism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, or English romantic and American transcendentalist, idealist philosophy. Most commonly, ecocritics have affiliated themselves with the standard contemporary blend of Foucauldian ideological criticism--a blend that is vaguely Marxist and Freudian, generally radical, and strongly tinctured with deconstructive irrationalism and textualism. 1Given its specialized themes and topics and its ready affiliation with the standard theoretical blend, ecocriticism might seem little more than a special topic area within the general field of contemporary [End Page 295] literary study. But ecocritics do not see their approach that way. They share in a feeling of being at the forefront of critical response to an urgent practical problem of world-historical magnitude: the prospect of irreversible environmental devastation. They thus have a strong sense of a political mission, and they often feel that the urgency of their environmental concerns should sanction realigning the canon to give much greater prominence to nature writers and to the study of ecological themes. In their view, the natural world claims a special status as the ultimate ground and frame of all existence. It is an object of peculiar veneration and of primary experiential importance.The special conceptual status of ecology as a theme and a topic necessarily raises a question about its theoretical import. If the subject of ecocriticism is the relation of literature and the natural world, and if this relation is more important and more elemental than any other concern, does it not follow that ecocriticism should identify itself as a matrix for all literary study? To put the question operationally, in what way could ecology, as a subject matter and a concept, generate a theory of literature? Since the relation between organisms and natural environments is a necessary precondition of all experience, one could reasonably argue that the special topic of ecocriticism is more elemental than the topics of feminism, Marxism, or any other form of political criticism, and that the basic physical conditions of organic life take conceptual precedence over semiotics and theories of "culture" and "discourse."I shall argue that ecology cannot by itself generate a theory of literature or serve as the basis for a theory of literature, but I shall also argue that responsiveness to the sense of place is an elemental component of the evolved human psyche and that it thus can and should be integrated into a Darwinian literary theory. E. O. Wilson's notion of "biophilia" provides a Darwinian alternative to the ecological transcendentalism of "deep ecology," and the evolutionary epistemology of Konrad Lorenz provides a Darwinian rationale for locating the human psyche within its physical world. In constructing a bridge between the evolutionary epistemology of Lorenz and the idea of place within verbal narrative, I shall make use of a new branch of Darwinian aesthetics, Joseph Anderson's "ecological" version of "cognitive film theory."In order to illustrate the ways in which setting can be integrated into a Darwinian literary criticism, in the latter part of the essay... (shrink)

The ideology of ‘purity’, normalcy and hierarchy through food and its relations is a postcolonial, feminist, queer issue. In an increasingly intolerant Hindutva political climate in India, a politics of enforced vegetarianism-based-purity as a mark of authenticity and ideal national identity intersects with liberalisation of the economy and globalisation of tastes to produce complex hierarchies of taste and ideas of culinary belonging. Given that literary and other cultural products can play an influential role in issues of social change, my (...) paper critically investigates how queer contemporary anglophone Indian fiction reworks dominant attitudes towards abjection through consumption, queering the approach to disgust as a stable marker of unbelonging in the contexts of postcoloniality and the transnational. Specifically, I examine approaches to abjection through food and discuss transgression through food as a postcolonial re-reading of disgust-based politics and aesthetics in two novels: The Boyfriend (2003) by author and gay-activist R. Raj Rao, and A Life Apart (2010) by writer-reviewer Neel Mukherjee—both of whom are part of an emerging group of authors writing in English and explicitly dealing with male same-sex desire in the subcontinent and the diaspora. Using a transnational and intersectional queer feminist lens on disgust and queering through food, I discuss how by challenging the hidden codes of a disgust-based gastro-politics and aesthetics in culture, The Boyfriend and A Life Apart reveal new spaces of sovereignty and self-expression in the everyday. In the process, I show how they provide fresh positions of resistance and subjectivity that complicate narrow ideas of belonging—national, diasporic and bodily—the production of which becomes crucial in the context of carving out a transnational queer (gastro) aesthetics and politics. (shrink)

This article draws on Donna Haraway’s call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative fiction used in secondary English curricula. The article then focuses on an in school creative writing project with grade 9 English students. In the student examples that I attend to, (...) speculative fabulations and situated feminisms are entangled, rendered complex, and in tension. In the final section, I discuss the Whiteness of mainstream speculative fiction and argue that speculative fabulation must be accountable to situated feminisms in how we read, write, and conduct research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, (...) a tool that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

This article draws on Donna Haraway’s call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative fiction used in secondary English curricula. The article then focuses on an in school creative writing project with grade 9 English students. In the student examples that I attend to, (...) speculative fabulations and situated feminisms are entangled, rendered complex, and in tension. In the final section, I discuss the Whiteness of mainstream speculative fiction and argue that speculative fabulation must be accountable to situated feminisms in how we read, write, and conduct research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen VintgesNancy BauerDebra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: (...) State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50.Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95.Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95.Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95.Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy.For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here.The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other.The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early... (shrink)

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework (...) based on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever. (shrink)

This anthology contextualizes key feminist texts and ideas by linking them with the transformation of public opinion brought about by the late Victorian debate on marriage, motherhood and women's right to an independent life. Included are Mona Caird's controversial The Morality of Marriage ; debates between feminists, traditionalists and anti-feminists on marriage, divorce and the New Woman, and selected reading from New Woman fiction, both feminist and anti-feminist, which reproduces the media debate on morality in literature.

Wittgenstein's farcical clash with literary critic F. R. Leavis over the analysis of Empson's poem "Legal Fiction" is well known to devotees of Wittgenstein's life (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (1981), edited by Rush Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 80). Less well known is the value of studying Empson's artistic and intellectual achievement as part of the wider cultural background for the appreciation of Wittgenstein's views and influence, early and late. This talk sketches some diverting byways awaiting further exploration. A recurrent theme (...) is contradiction. (shrink)

This article presents two cases of women doing development work for civil society organizations in the Global South. The author uses the cases to explicate the relationship of global civil society, development work, feminism, and Christianity. The case studies were collected through life history interviews with the participants. The cases, interpreted in light of the ‘third space’ cultural theory of Homi Bhabha, destabilize the fixed identity of these women as ‘development workers’, ‘feminists’, ‘Western’, and ‘Christian’.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more generally. Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, (...) in an extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, “directly address the nature of the work left to do, as.. (shrink)

A number of sport philosophers have noted the potential of sport as meaningful narrative and storytelling. While these arguments are convincing, they fail to acknowledge that not all athletes exper...

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day. Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire. By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive (...) conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while (...) its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

Hard direction, e.g.: Universalese to Organicese. Suggestion: ‘Some chairs wobble’ should become something like ‘If composition were universal, some chairs wobble’ or ‘Assuming that composition is universal, some chairs wobble’ or ‘According to the fiction that composition is universal, some chairs wobble’.

This essay provides an analysis of the theme of power in the text of the mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The author examines how this mediaeval woman learned to be an adroit shaper of power in her own life; how she understood the effects of corrupt clergy who persecuted her; how she directly faced corrupt power figures; how she used the rhetoric of femininity to subvert the more obvious power structures; how she gathered male friends (...) and clerics around her to legitimate her work; and how she skilfully negotiated the complex religious labyrinth of orthodoxy in her day. This essay provides an analysis of her engagement and entanglement of power relations, whether through her actions, her mystical work, or her direct discourse on the topic in Book VI of her text. (shrink)

Sarah Grand was one of the most prominent New Women of the 1890s and a notable social purity feminist and suffragist. This collection offers important insights into the full range of her journalistic output and lesser-known fictional writings. It also makes available biographical and autobiographical material, and previously unpublished manuscript sources. The first volume reproduces Grand's articles and the contemporary critical reception of her work. The letters in volume two, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, shed light on (...) Grand's genesis as a writer and her interaction with 1890s artistic and feminist circles. The third and fourth volumes contain a selection of short stories from three collections published at and after the turn of the century. These comment on some of the explosive issues of that time: feminism, decadence, eugenics, class, race and war. They also reflect Grand's exploration of the interplay between gender and genre. (shrink)

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst of (...) all possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction. (shrink)

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original (...) essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction. (shrink)

Is there life after theory? If the death of the Author has now been followed by the death of the Theorist, what's left? Indeed, who's left? To explore such riddles Life. After.Theory brings together new interviews with four theorists who are left, each a major figure in their own right: Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi, and Christopher Norris. Framed and introduced by Michael Payne and John Schad, the interviews pursue a whole range of topics, both familiar and unfamiliar. Among (...) other things, Derrida, Kermode, Moi and Norris discuss being an outsider, taking responsibility, valuing books, getting angry, doing science, listening to music, remembering Empson, rereading de Beauvoir, being Jewish, asking forgiveness, smoking in libraries, befriending the dead, committing bigamy, forgetting to forget, thinking, not thinking, believing, and being mad. These four key thinkers explore why there is life after theory...but not as we know it. Jacques Derrida is Professor at the +cole des Hautes +tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of a range of extraordinarily influential works including Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and Dissemination. Sir Frank Kermode is a former King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and author of, among many other books, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Shakespeare's Language, and Not Entitled, his memoirs. Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. Her books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. He has published some twenty books to date, including, most recently, Deconstruction and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism, Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Response-Dependence, and Hilary Putnam: Reason, Realism, and the Uses of Uncertainty. (shrink)

This essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social (...) theory, yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition of smarginatura, and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange by Helen PalmerTrevor Norris (bio)Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-3414-0Helen palmer is senior lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Kingston University in London and the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014). Her research examines queer theory, performance, literary modernism, gender, aesthetics, and feminist (...) and Afrofuturist fiction. Queer Defamiliarisation explores these ideas and also includes part of Palmer’s literary creative response to James Joyce. The project here is an inquiry into reading, thinking, writing, and pleasure and considers how language can change us when we experience the relationship between naming and the performance of identity as a material boundary: the places where our bodies, behavior, and language are subject to violence in gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms. Palmer also suggests how our own and others’ experiences of violence might be bound up with an aesthetics of linguistic and formal complexity, and she reimagines the difficulty of naming for violently excluded identities by reviewing a range of complex experimental and avant-garde literary works in which new identities can emerge. Showing us how we might understand the materiality of bodies, sense making, and desire in emancipa-tory ways, Palmer attunes us to a phenomenology of reading in which we [End Page 217] recognize how argument undergoes metamorphosis by always being a hybrid of theory, criticism, cultural history, appropriation, memoir, and experimental form. Palmer’s wide-ranging arguments speak about the porosity and mutual embeddedness of our selves, our language, our bodies and environments, and the queer processes of world creation that act on and emerge from these things. Placing her work with other texts that rethink gender, personhood and ecology through new materialisms is productive, therefore, and readers might find value in looking at Queer Defamiliarisation alongside Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Timothy Morton’s (2019)Humankind, and Rebecca Tamás’s (2020) Strangers inasmuch as they think through the ethics and emergence of relatedness and examine what it means to play, be alongside, care for, and nurture other beings and their worlds. Palmer’s project stays with the kind of “serious and... lively” trouble that allows “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Haraway 2016, 4).The fertile landscape is mapped out in three introductions whose themes are explored in four chapters. Palmer transforms the early-twentieth-century Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization as literary and aesthetic device, the “paradoxical process that... restores sensations to things through a [linguistic] distancing that is also a re-proximation, an approximation, a touching” (9), by reading early- to mid-twentieth-century literary and cultural theorists such as Shklovsky, Brecht, and Jakobson through the ideas of contemporary queer, feminist, and decolonial scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Vicki Kirby. She questions how the estrangement of naming operates for those whose bodies are not normatively gendered, racialized, and sexualized in relation to dominant forms of representation and power and explores concerns with and for queer, trans, decolonial, and feminist aesthetics. Throughout, she encourages us to think of the strangeness of language in relation to an ethics and an erotics of radical sympathy with the stranger because it is in the “continuous movement and continual transformation” (13) of naming, and categories of naming, that an emancipatory ethics can be found. This is a timely intervention by Palmer given current anxieties around naming gender and sex, and her argument seeks to move beyond “unhelpful binaries” to acknowledge the “infinite variations and permutations of existence and experience” (14).Palmer productively combines Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation from Queer Phenomenology (2006) with the psycholinguistic registers of Jakobson’s “contiguity and displacement” to suggest that queer defamiliarization is a performance of language and naming that “cleaves through and between sameness and difference,” “knocking signifiers loose and ungrounding bodies,” leading to “perceptual shifts and corporeal responses” that can “materially en-gender newness” (Palmer 17). From the start of the section “Spectaxa” (152), Palmer foregrounds the materiality of her text in increasingly modernistic excess to illustrate what we have been reading and... (shrink)

Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes. The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish, in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and groves/Elysian" be (...) "A simple produce of the common day" . But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day," the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent divergences from Wordsworth .Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism and Victorian fiction. (shrink)

During the past few years, feminist critics have approached writing by women with an "abiding commitment to discover what, if anything, makes women's writing different from men's" and a tendency to feel that some significant differences do exist.4 The most common answer is that women's experiences differ from men's in profound and regular ways. Critics using this approach find recurrent imagery and distinctive content in writing by women, for example, imagery of confinement and unsentimental descriptions of child care. The (...) other main explanation of female difference posits a "female consciousness" that produces styles and structures innately different from those of the "masculine mind." The argument from experience is plausible but limited in its applications: the argument from a separate consciousness is subject to mystification and circular evidence. In both cases, scholars tend to list a few characteristics of writing by women without connecting or explaining them.· 4. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism"", Critical Inquiry 2 : 78.Judith Kegan Gardiner is an associate professor of English and a member of the women's studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The author of Craftmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Johnson's Poetry as well as articles on Robert Burton, feminist literary criticism, and contemporary women writers, she is currently working on a study of twentieth-century fiction by women. (shrink)

Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of coherence, “order,” and unitary explanation. Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute the formation of a single national canon to a specific period , to a (...) specific and allegedly homogeneous group of actors , and to a specific social phenomenon , Lecker’s essay becomes another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise assumptions not only about “Canadian critics” but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative legitimacy of canonicity claims. “At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon,” his essay begins . Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the attainment of literary “legitimacy”? Can there be no canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or “academic critics,” or if it has not been institutionalized as an “independent” subject? Frank Davey, chair of the department of English at York University, is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian Literature Since 1960 , Surviving the Paraphrase , Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics , and Reading Canadian Reading . He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line magazine Swiftcurrent. He is currently working on a study of nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National Arguments. (shrink)

My study of Mary Shelley and father includes her husband because Percy Shelley’s obsessions with patriarchy, with “ ‘GOD, AND KIND, AND LAW,’ ” influenced profoundly Mary’s* art and life. Percy’s idealizations of father in The Revolt of Islam and Prince Athanase indicated ways or resolving familial antagonisms which Mary adopted and developed her later fiction. Percy’s relationship with Frankenstein is still more intricate. Recognizing that her husband’s obsessions with father and self-creation were contributing to the deterioration of their marriage, (...) Mary represents these obsessions in Victor Frankenstein—partly to vent in art the anger which would have further damaged the marriage, and party to show Percy before it was too late the errors of his ways. It was too late. Percy responded to Frankenstein in Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci with a reaffirmation of sonship which has been largely unrecognized by scholars.Father looms so large for both Mary and Percy Shelley that no one critical approach can account for him fully. At their most idealistic—and thus most traditional—the Shelleys encourage a critical methodology which integrates the traditional disciplines of biographical and close textual analyses. By taking this approach to Mary’s later fiction and to Percy’s The Revolt of Islam, I can not only confirm the prominence of father for the Shelleys but also establish the ideal against which their most subversive and important art was created. Reading this indirect, overdetermined art in light of the negative Oedipus will help answer important questions about Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci and will, I hop, add to our understanding of the vexed role of father in the Romantic period and in subsequent generations whose children we are. William Veeder, professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published books on Yeats, Henry James, and Victorian feminism. His Mary Shelley and “Frankenstein”: The Fate of Androgyny will appear in December 1985. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, coedited with Susan M. Griffin, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Centenary, a collection of new essays on Stevenson’s novel, are also forthcoming . He is currently at work on The Serpent’s Tale: Anglo-American Gothic Fiction, 1885-1914. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern (...) imperialism. China has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

I have taken such pains to indicate the scope, terms, and foci of Neumann's analysis because he provides one of the main pillars on which any further systematic study of the woman hero must rest. By showing Psyche's relation to the mythic or archetypal structure of heroism, by demonstrating the particular ways in which the hero is a figure distinguished primarily by involvement in particular patterns of action and psychological development, Neumann provides an invaluable service to further studies of literature, (...) heroism, and women. Without belaboring the distinction between the hero and the heroine, Neumann validates the claim that a woman can be a hero and eliminates the awkward distinction between the heroine as heroic figure and the heroine as conventional woman that has perplexed so much recent literary, especially feminist, analysis.1 He is also very good at locating the details in Psyche's dilemma that constitute significant associative images within a narrative representing heroism by means of a female character. Specifically, he indicates how Psyche's beauty is as much a burden as a boon, shows the importance of her relationship to other female characters, and points out the ways in which the apparent hostility of other women acts as a necessary goad to Psyche's own developing independence. Neumann's analysis is also suggestive in showing the appropriateness of archetypal criticism to material which is not myth in the narrow sense. To be sure, Apuleius' Amor and Psyche results from the distillation of narratives whose origins are clearly to be found in the folklore and functioning mythologies of Greek and Roman culture; just as clearly, however, Apuleius is telling his tale as part of a highly self-conscious, complexly structured narrative2 analogous, in some ways, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's great religious epics, and even that seemingly least mythic set of narrative structures, the novel. · 1. See, e.g., Ellen Moers' long discussion of "heroinism" in Literary Women: The Great Writers , pp. 113-242. Moers' use of this awkward term, the female version of the presumably masculine heroism, perpetuates the idea that only men can be true heroes, while extraordinary women remain "special cases" necessitating special terminology.· 2. See P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel: The 'Satyricon' of Petronius and the 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius , pp. 141-223. Lee R. Edwards is an editor of The Massachusetts Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is presently completing The Labors of Psyche: Female Heroism and Fictional Form. (shrink)

Barbara Caine's fascinating analysis of feminism in England examines the relationship between feminist thought and actions, and wider social and cultural change over tow centuries. Professor Caine investigates the complex question surrounding the concept of a feminist 'tradition', and showshow much the feminism of any particular period related to the years preceding or following it. Though feminism may have lacked the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought, the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft was something (...) which all nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryfeminists had to come to terms with. Her story was a constant reminder of the connection between the demand for political and legal rights, and its conflation with the issues of personal and sexual rebellion. Like Wollstonecraft, every woman pioneer into the public arena faced assaults on her honouras well as on her intellectual position. The author also addresses the language of feminism: the introduction and changing meanings of the term 'feminist';the importance of literary representations of women; and the question of how one defines feminism, and establishes boundaries between feminismand the 'woman question'. She ends with a discussion of the new emphasis, post-1980s, on the need to think about 'feminisms' in the plural, rather than any single kind of feminism. analysis of feminist organizations, debates, and campaigns shows a keen sense of the relationship between feministthought and actions, and wider social and cultural change. The result is a fascinating study with a new perspective on feminists and feminist traditions, which can be used both as an introductory text and as an interpretative work. Professor Caine examines the complex questions surrounding theconcept of a feminist 'tradition', and shows how much the feminism of any particular period related to the years preceding or following it. Though feminism may have lacked the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought, the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft is seen here assomething which all nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists had to come to terms with. Her story was a constant reminder of the connection between the demand for political and legal rights, and its conflation with the issues of personal and sexual rebellion. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, every womanpioneer into the public arena was faced with assaults on her honour as well as on her intellectual position. Professor Caine also addresses the language of feminism: the introduction and changing meanings of the term `feminist'; the importance of literary representations of women; and the questionof how one defines feminism, and establishes boundaries between feminism and the `woman question'. She ends with a discussion of the new emphasis, post-1980s, on the need to think about `feminisms' in the plural, rather than any single kind of feminism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval EnglandEdward E. FosterThe French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, by William Calin; xvi & 587pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.Probably not many people will read all of this book, because it is very long. That is too bad, because it is also very good and its length is necessary for its double purpose: (...) to reconceptualize the connections between French and English literature in the Middle Ages and to provide sensitive interpretations both of familiar and of ignored Medieval narratives. The doubleness is neatly reciprocal: the readings grow into the revisionist definition of influence, and the notion of influence informs the individual readings.The innovative and persuasive argument that orders the whole book is that the impact of the French tradition has been too narrowly defined. Rather than simply retracing the influence of the classics of French fin amour, like Chrétien, on the corpus of Middle English literature, Calin sinuously argues the influence of Anglo-Norman and thirteenth and fourteenth century Central French works on the literature of the high English Middle Ages. From Anglo-Norman, Calin draws, predictably, on the lais of Marie de France. Less predictably, he draws on Beroul and Thomas of England and on romances like Ipomedon, Amadas et Ydione, and Gui de Warewic. Least predictably, he draws on the tradition of saints’ lives as formative of later Medieval moral narrative. From Central French, he draws, predictably, on the Roman de la Rose. Less predictably, but very convincingly, he draws on material frequently slighted even by French critics: Guillaume de Digulleville, the Prose Lancelot, Machaut, Froissart, and Chartier. But even more than influence, in the traditional sense, Calin persuasively demonstrates an enlivening intertextuality. He rescues Anglo-Norman classics from their stodgy reputation and late Central French texts from inattention and makes both relevant to the development of the English narrative tradition in court poetry and in popular romance.The power of Calin’s overarching argument depends heavily on the critiques of individual works. Without forgetting Chrétien and the earlier French tradition, he traces in Marie, Beroul, and Thomas, the formation and complication of fin amour which were present and available to English writers. He describes the narrative force of Anglo-Norman saints’ lives on the fictional techniques of English romance. His acute treatment of interlace in the Prose Lancelot reveals the treasure trove that English romancers could draw on, for technique as well as themes. In addition, he shows both how de Digulleville served up the “dream vision” and Machaut and Froissart served up the limited, even bumbling, narrator for fourteenth-century England.It could be argued that Calin’s method of doing very modern or postmodern analyses of early French poetry and prose is misleading. And it is true that some of the readings of French texts seem eccentric. For example, the relentless imposition of Freud on Marie is perplexing even when plausible. One wonders [End Page 400] whether this is the best way to approach the Lais. And Calin moves on to feminist, and old and new historicist readings of other texts. Each is well done, but it is sometimes hard to tell which way the winds of theory are blowing and why. While it must be granted that the interpretations of Middle English romances, like Ywain and Gawain, Amis and Amiloun, and William of Palerne, are not profoundly different from what other scholars have come to, there is no denying that embedding them in their French contexts gives them a richness they ordinarily lack. Even more laudable is the way in which influence is elaborated not just as a matter of themes but as a transformation of techniques and even sensibility.My greatest reservation is the treatment of Chaucer, especially “The Franklin’s Tale.” Calin does recognize Chaucer’s debts to the classics (though mostly through the Ovid Moralisé) and to the Italians. Yet Chaucer is the one author for whom the weight of French intertextuality seems less a determinant than a stimulant. In “The Franklin’s Tale,” the French burden leads to a reading that too easily dismisses both ironic... (shrink)