ENGL 810: PAB #8: Nina Byam: “The Agony of Feminism: Why Feminist Theory Is Necessary After All”

Byam, Nina. “The Agony of Feminism: Why Feminist Theory Is Necessary After All.” The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory, edited by Dwight Eddins. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995, pp. 101-17.

Byam discusses feminist discord emerging from, among other things, the we that feminist critics “presume to speak for” (102), and such is my dilemma. Byam points out the diversity among feminist scholars and critics, and the problem that once a scholar makes a statement about women, the statement cannot define all women and comes under attack by those scholars it misses. How can I speak for women other than myself, or even can I? Does all my theoretical writing become all about the “I”?

The Gender Criticism

The Gender Criticism

Early feminist theory that relied on Freud and Lacan, Byam points out, is based on psychoanalytic approaches that are inherently misogynistic, implying that women desire to be men. Even the feminist’s initial dichotomy of gender becomes problematic (102).

While discussing feminist approaches to earlier eras, Byam states that feminist criticism has never been formalist, “if formalism means being preoccupied or even more than superficially interested in technique” (108). However, form, including rhetorical and linguistic form, can reveal much about an writer’s intentions, so is this because the formalist approach has not been taken up or because there’s an inherent problem with applying the theory? See Literary Theory at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

from Know Your Meme

from Know Your Meme

In her discussion of gynocritics and distinctions made between men’s and women’s writing, Byam says that “women tend[] to write about women” (113). Byam points out that the origins of gynocritics, like those of the early feminists, were white middle-class women. I can see how marginalized women would protest this positioning (114); however, if the first gynocritics were white middle-class women, how could they speak for anyone besides themselves? Feminism seems rather treacherous in this unfortunate “you can’t speak for me”—“what about us” dichotomy. Byam says, “Gynocritics were also vulnerable to the Utopian expectation that all works by women would be ideological correct in all particulars,” but were then faced with the dilemmas of classist and lesbian authors (114), “Or when the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson called the Indians devils incarnate?” (115).

Byam claims she

“want[s] to argue that to accept subjectivity and individuality as the basis of feminist practice does not require on to accept the philosophy of Ayn Rand or accede to an old-style humanistic definition of the individual subject as autonomous, self-made, individually self-consistent, and self-empowering. The humanism [she] adhere[s] to is called ‘critical humanism’ by Tzvetan Todorov.” (115)

In this, Byam suggests that all women are individuals, humans, and that “subjectivity is more or less determined, in proportions unknown and perhaps unknowable…by history, society, and biology” (115).

LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM NOTES

LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM NOTES

 

 

ENGL 810: Theoretical & Epistemological Alignment

Theoretical & Epistemological Alignment

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Sinéad Travers ‏@travers_sinead

Sinéad Travers ‏@travers_sinead on Twitter

My  background is in creative writing, poetic, and feminist theories. Other approaches useful in interrogating texts include feminist, gender, creative writing, poetic, literary, rhetoric, cultural, Marxist, and linguistic theories. Yes, there are a lot, but why limit myself in terms of how I approach my subject. No, I haven’t listed all the theories, but I see myself using many and in combinations. My experience has been that the primary theories used are determined by the immediate task at hand. Since I want to explore how women define themselves and other women as women in poetry, questions of self-identification, language usage, creative expression, cultural positioning, and power and class structures all seem to be fruitful avenues of exploration. As T. S. Eliot says, “we might remind ourselves that criticism is an inevitable as breathing” (111).

My experience with the ways other scholars have approached literary criticism and my creative writing background have allowed me to approach literature under the lens of creative writing theory, which allows a critical approach based on the writer’s act of constructing the work to elicit specific responses from readers as well as the reader’s actual response, in Frost’s words, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader” (11), or Tess Gallagher, “the reader is also the maker of the poem as it lives again in his consciousness” (107).

Although I won’t eschew traditional theoretical paradigms, I intend for my professional alignment to be new, to deviate from what others have done, but not too far afield. As I remain open-minded, see what the theorists have told us, I can create new approaches. I had done so in my master’s degree work with much satisfaction and success. For example, I compared Heart of Darkness to Jane Eyre using a female gothic lens to interrogate both works, and later, applying the theoretical framework established in Martin Bidney’s “Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne’s Tales,” I examined works by Raymond Carver to establish patterns surrounding epiphanic moments, which revealed epiphanies not solidly established in previous research. Bidney had applied the theoretical framework of images from Serge Lemaire and Norman Holland to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (59).

Objects of Study

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Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde

My primary objects of study for my dissertation will be poems written by women to see how women are defined within that poetry because “[p]oetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (Lorde 283). I’m still open to new positioning and possibilities.  With these, I envision my specific theoretical approaches in terms of how these approaches address and figure women in context as well as how, given the nature of creative writing/poetic theory, women use the tools provided in self-identification. Elements of creative writing theory such as meter, voice, line breaks, and musicality inform creative writing and provide new ways of seeing such as line breaks, which “can record the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between word and word that are characteristic of the mind’s dance among perceptions but which are not noted by grammatical punctuation” (Levertov 266).

In poetic criticism, much of the research has involved individual poems, books of poetry, or individual poets, and these poems, books, and poets are most often already canonized. My intent is to break from this canonized work and explore the work of women who are writing now, are new to the field, having written few books, and have published their work within the last decade.

Agenda

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-Sapere Aude

-Sapere Aude

Although things have changed since 1977 when Alicia Ostriker noted, “What has not changed is that most critics and professors of literature, including modern literature, deny that ‘women’s poetry,’ as distinct from poetry by individual women, exists. Many women writers agree. Some will not permit their work to appear in women’s anthologies” (311), women still struggle to find recognition of their work; furthermore, her comment on the work that was “explicitly female in the sense that the writer has consciously chosen not to “write like a man” but to explore experiences central to her sex” may still be true to an extent (310).

Lakoff’s consideration of women and language from the 1970s still provides the “overall effect of ‘women’s language’…is this: it submerges a woman’s personal identity” (42), and as she continues discussing the differences in production and cultural expectation, she says, “women are allowed to fuss and complain, but only a man can bellow in rage” (45). Adrienne Rich comments on the poetic climate of the 1970s when she discusses the “thwarting of [a woman’s] needs by a culture controlled by males” and problems this creates “for the woman writer” (349). This oppression and inequality for women still exists. Men are still more recognized and more compensated for their poetic work, but she says, women are writing poetry, studying literature, and “looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about; she meets the image of Woman in books written by men” (351).

Women still don’t have equal rights. And though women have made progress in some areas, women still struggle with issue of body autonomy. Rape is rarely punished, and now we have presidential candidates who speak openly about sexually assaulting women with no repercussions. Safe access to abortion, which had been secured through Roe v Wade, is being rolled back, creating hardships for poor women in particular. For women, still, poetry provides Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” (11).

Personal/Professional Objectives

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favim.com

favim.com

The broader lens, under which this women’s poetry falls, is American literature, I will continue my inquiry, collecting and comparing both poetry and fiction, because “No poet, no artist of any art, has is complete meaning alone….you must set him, for contrast and comparison among the dead” (Eliot 112). I plan to focus most heavily in the 20th and 21st centuries, in order to comparative work, I will need to expand out. In poetry and prose, “the passion for the things of the world and the passion for naming them must be in him indistinguishable” (Levertov 263), and to further Levertov’s point, the passion for investigating this process of naming is why I’ve chosen to research in this way.

Works Cited

Bidney, M. “Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne’s Tales.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 50 no. 1, 2008, pp. 58-89. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tsl.2008.0000. Accessed 19 Oct. 2016.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004, pp. 111-16.

Frost, Robert. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004, pp. 11-12.

Gallagher, Tess. “The Poem as a Time Machine.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 104-116.

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. “Language and Woman’s Place.” Language and Women’s Place: Text and Commentaries, ed. Mary Bucholtz. Oxford UP, 2004, pp. 39-75.

Levertov, Denise. “On the Function of the Line.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 265-72.

—. “Origins of a Poem.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 254-64.

Lorde, Audrey. “Poems Are Not Luxuries.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 282-5.

Ostriker, Alicia. “The Nerves of a Midwife: Contemporary American Women’s Poetry.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 309-27.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 345-61.

ENGL 810: PAB #6: Audre Lorde, “Poems Are Not Luxuries”

Lorde, Audrey. “Poems Are Not Luxuries.” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 282-85.

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde on Poetry Foundation

Among the theoretical approaches I have available for my research is creative writing theory, and more specifically, poetic theory. I have moved so far from the poetry I was writing into the idea of examining poetry by women, that somehow, the actual poetics, the poems themselves, were lost to me. It is all about the poems, and the form (or genre) of poetry is essential to my project. Much has been written in poetic theory about line, musicality, form, and “appropriate” subject matter for poems. T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” speaks to poetry’s connection to the history of poetry and literature. I might have begun there, but Eliot speaks directly out of the male-dominated canon of 1921.

So, I’ve added this essay by Audre Lorde which makes the case that for women, “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep” (282). Even though she is a black woman poet and she is talking about the poetry of black women poets, she is talking about the poetry of women poets. Though black women poets feel oppression multiply, all women understand what oppression is. Her article points out the importance of women’s poetry to women.

I risk, in this assessment of Lorde’s essay, saying something deeply offensive to black women poets, and it’s not my intent at all, but how can I discover my wrongheadedness if I don’t express what I believe, laying it out in the light, so that I can be shown where and how these connections I’ve made work to uphold women’s poetry and what would work to undermine the progress my fellow poets have made.

Lorde sees women’s survival as a two-fold proposition: “to cherish our feelings” and “to respect those hidden sources of our power” (283).

Men have also written about poetry as a survival tool, particularly Gregory Orr, but for women poets, “[i]t is a vital necessity of our existence.” As she is writing, women’s poetry is beginning to be recognized, and Langston Hughes has found his place among the recognized poets, but black women poets are struggling for recognition.

Poetry, for Lorde, is a path toward fashioning our feelings into “sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas” (283), and she suggests that women’s poetry is “not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean” (283). Admittedly, men’s poetry has moved away from what she’s accused, but her estimation based on her experience of the canon as it was in 1977 was a fair point. She addresses the idea that women’s poetry is not serious poetry, that women have been “diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality,” and evidence still exists for this diminished status of women’s poetry, or perhaps the elevated status of men’s poetry, in the recognition of men’s poetry through awards and accolades. Lorde, like many other poets, accedes “there are no new ideas,” but she does suggest there are “new ways of making them felt” 285).

Among women writers, the prizes are fewer. Even with the last Nobel Prize winner, rather than recognizing the accomplishments of a woman writer, the committee chose to recognize a male singer, Bob Dylan. His work is excellent, no doubt, but does it really surpass the excellence of so many women writers?

See The New York Times on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

See Lucia Trent, “Aren’t Women Better Fitted than Men to be Poets?”

See The Guardian: “Research Shows Male Writers Still Dominate Books World”

Do women writers have ‘literary cooties’? -Maclean's

Do women writers have ‘literary cooties’? -Maclean’s

 

More prose by Audre Lorde

Poetry by Audre Lorde

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde on Amazon.com

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde on Amazon.com

 

ENGL 810: PAB #4: Daphne Grace: “Cognition, Consciousness, and Literary Contexts”

 

Grace, Daphne. “Cognition, Consciousness, and Literary Texts.” Beyond Bodies: Gender, Literature, and the Enigma of Consciousness. New York; Rodopi, 2014, pp 9-32. Adobe Digital Editions. Accessed 26 Sept. 2016.

Sebastian Berggren 1999 for Wild Side Story

Sebastian Berggren 1999 for Wild Side Story -From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

Within feminist theory, and by extension feminist literary theory, the question of gender and gender identity is a conundrum that theorists attempt to reconcile, and Grace approaches feminist critical theory from the inside out. Rather than use the theory to prove the text, she uses the text to prove the theory. Within a heady discussion of consciousness and awareness, gender performance as normative and subversive, she points to women writers, particularly Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, who have subverted normative gender roles by writing strong women in Austen’s case and male/female role reversal in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (12). Grace even dips back as far as Geoffrey Chaucer to examine the subverted gender roles in Troilus and Criseyde and characterizing Criseyde as “[f]eisty and independent” (15). She asserts that authors seek to question or to challenge social, cultural and political hegemonies that restrict a women’s freedom of speech or behavior, and to establish empowerment of women as individuals, as agents of action, and as writers” (11).

In my creative writing program, I wrote and watched others write as a way to tease out their own sense of themselves, grappling out our struggles on pages of story and poem. So, I can see why looking at literature is a valid way to explore the nature of human sexuality and understand how Grace would see that as a valid exploration as well.

In answering the question of gender, feminist scholars have looked to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to suss out “[w]hether gender and sex are biologically or culturally constructed” (12-13). Grace asserts that “[a]n approach to knowledge from within the arts or humanities begins from the inner most core of creative inspiration” will lead to “manifest expression,” which all ties into identity (19). Grace outlines how literary theory, using trauma theory, has shown real promise in determining the nature of trauma and extrapolates in the hope that gender theory applied in literature theory will add new insight to gender identity (20-21).

Furthermore, these English women writers are a testament to how different the culture was for American women writers. Yes, they did write anonymously, and their work was often regarded as inferior to the high art of male writers, but their writing was not timid or modest, particularly considering the work of Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft.  Anne Bradstreet was writing at a much earlier time, but the rest of these women were writing in the 1800s and 1900s.

This may seem far afield of my focus; however, identity is the key to my current vision for my dissertation, to see how women define themselves and other women in their own writing, so exploring feminist theories of identity, particularly that which related to literature and poetry moves me significantly closer to understanding how my project fits in the ongoing conversation.

For more on gender: