Authorship and Women — Generating a List

ecriturefemme

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Authorship and Women — Generating a List

Sunday, 11 November 07 at 10:24 pm · Filed under Authorship and tagged: Academia, Authorship, Autobiography, Comps, Feminism

A running list of feminist scholars and theorists that write about women and authorship. Feel free to comment and help me make this list more comprehensive!

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar — on anxiety and many other aspects of female authorship, like naming and female creativity
Carolyn Heilbrun — on autobiography
Susan Stanford Friedman, on autobiography, HD, and the long poem
Sidonie Smith — autobiography
Shari Benstock–autobiography
Liz Stanley — autobiography
Jennifer Summitt — medieval women from the Middle Ages
Karma Lochrie — Margery Kempe, writing of the body, and the “female mystic”
Cixous — God/Priestess writing scheme, authorship anxiety
Irigaray — intersections between authorship and sexuality, women’s genelogies
Minh-ha — God/Priestess writing scheme
Alice Walker — African-American women and authorship
Jane Tompkins — academic writing and autobiography
Nancy Miller — autobiography
Holly Laird — collaboration and co-authorship
Ann Vickery — whose work I haven’t had time to really delve into yet, but that explores issues of gender and authorship in work by female LangPoets

I know I’m leaving out a bunch of Rhet Comp scholars, mainly because I haven’t found them useful yet for my theoretical purposes. And, I know this list mainly focuses on autobiography and authorship of the self, a dominant theme in second wave feminist theory. That’s it for now.

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2 Comments »

uncomplicatedly wrote @ Monday, 12 November 07 at 1:00 am

Is this list for Ph.D. exam purposes? One half of my “theory” exam list was on gender & writing; I’d be happy to email it to you. (At my school; we do lists on primary & secondary fields, & a 3rd list on 1 or 2 theory fields.)

And– welcome to wordpress! I really truly am going to start writing again soon. I just passed my exams!

ecriturefemme wrote @ Monday, 12 November 07 at 4:58 am

Oh, yes, please do email it to me! You can just send it to eeinkeeink@gmail.com. This might be the beginning of one of my lists, not sure yet; I need to talk to my adviser about it. She just had a baby and has been on leave. Right now, I’m thinking my exam lists will be on international modernism (1910-45), poetry, and either feminist/gender or authorship theory (which overlaps a good bit).

Congrats on passing your exam! That’s a nice hurtle to get past!! I won’t take mine for another year or so. And, yes, I too need to write on the blog more….

I would like to talk to you sometime about what you’re thinking of writing your dissertation on. Our interests overlap so much that it’d be nice to compare notes, but also to be sure that we’re not both writing about the same things! Again, congrats on passing comps! Time for cocktails!

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from Susan Gubar, by way of Virginia Woolf

"If we are lucky enough to evade mass warfare and ecological disaster, to live another century or so and in rooms of our own; if we cultivate habits of courage and learning, integrity and good humor in ourselves and in each other; acknowledging the the permeability of the walls, gates, and doors that protect but divide us; if we work, even in poverty and obscurity, looking past the bogey of what we know to be parochial interests to see human beings in relation to their rooms but also to each other and to the multitudinous environments inhabited in common, for we lie in a world not our own and not ourselves; then the opportunity will come; the dormant mathematician or political visionary, scientist or composer will put on the body that was so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of Shakespeare's sisters -- because Shakespeare has had many sisters, of many complexions, and from many different lands [...] -- she will be born. As for her coming without renewed and determined resistance to forces that would curtail women's freedom, this would be impossible. But she is coming -- to be born not again, but for the first time, and to dwell among us." ~ Susan Gubar from _Rooms of Our Own_ p.222-3

Lyn Hejinian:

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world -- to close the gap between ourselves and things -- and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so. Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (imaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable. p. 56 _Language of Inquiry_

Minh-ha

"Writing, in a way, is listening to the others' language and reading with others' eyes. The more ears I am able to hear with, the farther I see the plurality of meaning and the less I lend myself to the illusion of a single message. I say I write when I leave speech, when I lose my grip on it and let it make its way on its own. I am there only to provide it with a passageway. Why view these aspects of an individual which we imply in the term "writer" or "author" as projections of an isolated self and not of our common way of handling texts? For writing, like a game that defies its own rules, is an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting "me" into langugage, but with creating an opening where the "me" disappears while "I" endlessly come and go, as the the nature of language requires. To confer an Author on a text is to close the writing." ~Trinh Minh-ha in _Woman Native Other_ p. 30-5

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