ENGL 810: Theoretical & Epistemological Alignment

Posted on October 20, 2016 by ahart006_1y5cvd

Theoretical & Epistemological Alignment

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

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

-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

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: FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM: WHAT IT ASKS, WHERE IT LEADS

Posted on October 6, 2016 by ahart006_1y5cvd

Dykes to Watch Out For: The Rule – Alison Bechdel, 1985

The Major Questions

According to Shira Wolosky, the major questions within feminist literary criticism are:

“what place have women had in what has been a resolutely male tradition of literature? How have women been represented, and how does this affect their own self-representation? What have been the (male) models of authorships, and how do these serve—or not—as models for the authorship of women? Are there gendered aspects of literary genres, of imagery, of language itself? What do we even mean by a ‘women’s’ literature? What would distinguish it from ‘men’s’ literature, other than the fact that women have written it?” (1)

Although the question of women’s absence in the canon does not appear in her list, Wolosky cites it as a “core concern” (1), which is a primary concern for me as are the final two questions.

The Origins of the Questions

Women had been excluded; therefore, women have struggled to have their writing canonized in a canon that “derive[d] from typically male experiences” (Code qtd. in Lang 313). British women like the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, among others, had found their ways into the male canon (Grace 12) earlier than American women. By the time I was studying English in 2000, women figured prominently in literature.

Sexy Lamp Test

The Ongoing Research

In researching feminist literary criticism as a subject, most of the writing occurred in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, trickling into the nineties, and when the conversation turns in favor of feminist criticisms of specific literary works. While researching, I found “newer” texts were frequently reprints of older work.

My own bookcase features a wealth of feminist writing and criticism from the eighties and nineties and includes authors such as Antonia Fraser, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, as well as gender studies author, Judith Butler. These women illustrate an energetic conversation about how women have been viewed, ignored, exploited, benefitted, and eventually, recognized as people and authors. Through examining recent scholarship, the focus is shifting from the inclusion of women’s writing to criticism focused on individual works.

Presently, new paradigms to assess how women are portrayed in film, and in literature include approaches like Shira Wolosky’s, examining literature in terms of gender and cultural theories through a decidedly feminist lens, and Wolosky, and Cheryl Glenn’s, examining women’s silences and modesties as deliberate and political. And, Daphne M. Grace explores the female body in literature, “locating and discussing the relationship of the gendered body and consciousness” in writing by men and women (15).

Furiosa Test

Scott Selisker presents “The Bechdel Test,”[i] based on one of Alison Bechdel’s comic strip episodes in Dykes to Watch Out For, which was dubbed “vernacular criticism” by Brian Droitcour (Selisker 505), examines how women are portrayed in films, in which a film must pass three criteria (514). Based on Selisker’s paraphrasing of Heather Love on network studies: “this empirical style of reading can and should be applied to the networks within literary texts, too” (508), and we should consider women in literature likewise. Selisker also suggests Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s approach, examining texts in terms of “surface reading,” or “describing the ‘patterns that exist writing and across texts’” (508), showing how women act as network lines for the benefit of men within texts.

Where Does This Lead?

My focus, as I envision it, interrogates women’s poetry to see how women present themselves and other women within the poetry they write, which may incorporate any of these new approaches. Of course, “the way we view our bodies is synonymous with how we view ourselves” (Bleier qtd. in Grace 12), so with Judith Butler’s lead, considering gender as a construct and a performance and how women construct themselves female, the differences between women’s early writing and their mature writing should reveal whether their construction or (re)construction of gender over time reinforces or dismantles their earlier perceptions of their respective gender identities.

[i] Other “vernacular criticisms” include “The Mako Mori Test,” “The Sexy Lamp Test,” and “The Furiosa Test”

Works Cited

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.

Lang, James C. “Feminist Epistemologies of Situated Knowledges: Implications for Rhetorical Argumentation.” Informal Logic, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2010, pp. 309-334. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiV4eeWnsbPAhXGNz4KHcCVBvwQFggkMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwindsor.scholarsportal.info%2Fojs%2Fleddy%2Findex.php%2Finformal_logic%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F3036%2F2424&usg=AFQjCNECZegOhT707ziw1dvgImlFwgbBFA&sig2=5i0UOsz3eTZtivlHFEVS7Q

Selisker, Scott. “The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks.” New Literary History, Vol. 46, No. 3, Summer 2015, pp. 505-523. Project Muse. DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2015.0024.

Wolosky, Shira. “Modest Muses: Feminist Literary Criticism.” Feminist Theory Across Disciplines: Feminist Community and American Women’s Poetry. New York; Taylor & Francis; Routledge, 2013, pp 1-22. Adobe Digital Editions. Accessed 26 Sept. 2016.

ENGL 810: Feminist Literary Criticism and Women’s Studies History

Posted on September 22, 2016 by ahart006_1y5cvd

Virginia Woolf “A Room of One’s Own” from QuoteAddicts

INTRODUCTION

Before the proliferation women’s studies scholarship, women wrote all manner of things. Although the literary canon is still fraught with omissions, as an undergraduate I read many early women writers: women who wrote novels, poems, narratives, essays, books on manners, diaries, letters, and more. Still, for many, the genesis of feminist writing is Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1928) where Woolf examines the dearth of scholarly spaces available to women. Some look closer to the present at Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) in which she claimed, “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” asserting man is first and women is second, and establishing woman as “Other” (Knellwolf 196). Woman as “other” forms the basis for much, if not all, feminist critical theory.

FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

I see the real emergence of feminist literary criticism during the second-wave feminism, even as Gill Plain and Susan Sellers point out, feminist literary criticism wasn’t birthed in whole at this moment. Plain and Sellers say feminist literary criticism was the “culmination of centuries of women’s writing,” and of men “writing about women’s minds, bodies, art, and ideas” (2). It is during the later 1960s and 1970s that feminist writers began to build a formidable repertoire of feminist work. The activism of the feminist movement during this period motivated many women to counter the male dominated landscape, and they did this en masse. In creating this work, women created spaces for themselves in academia: in the 1960s, women’s studies classes appear; in the 1970s, we see the creation of women’s studies programs, and now, universities have entire women’s studies departments.

FEMINIST SCHOLARS & WOMEN’S STUDIES

The first women’s studies program was established at San Diego State University in 1970 (Ginsberg 10). Women’s studies programs at other universities were not far behind. “A feminist conference held at Cornell in January 1969” was the inspiration for their “Female Studies” program, later Cornell Women’s Studies (Cornell Chronicle), and now, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Even with women’s studies programs established, the first feminist scholars came from all over and from a variety of different disciplines (Knellwolf 197). A quick survey of the mentions and sources which appear in just the few texts I’ve consulted reveal a diverse group of feminist writers who published feminist works during the 1970s, feminist writers like Elaine Showalter, Adrienne Rich, Kate Millett, Judith Fetterly, Germaine Greer, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar.

WHY WE NEED FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

The exigency for the emergence of feminist literary criticism was that feminists found that women’s writing was omitted from the canon and that women who appeared in the literature were written from a male-centric point of view. According to Alice E. Ginsberg, “Women’s Studies had a very clear purpose, and that was to transform the university so that knowledge about women was no longer invisible, marginalized, or made ‘other’” (10). This omission, or erasure, of women from the history of literature, according to Annette Kolodny, quoting Clifford Gertz, “came to be ‘viewed collectively as a structural inconsistency’ within the very disciplines we studied” (1). My undergraduate experience of early British literature was comprised almost entirely of men; the exception was Jane Austen. The point of feminist literary criticism was to change things by seeking “to uncover its own origins” and “establish traditions of women’s writing and early ‘feminist’ thought” (Plain and Sellers 2). Feminist critical scholars set out to find their missing heritage, to amend the male-centric history to include women, and to show the value of the women they found. Feminist literary scholars also interrogate works to discover how a culture sees itself, and for me, I’m interested in exploring the ways that women writers define themselves and each other in the twenty-first century. I want to see how far women have moved past the male-centered definitions that have been applied to us for so long.

FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM & THE UNIVERSITY

The relationship between feminist literary criticism and the university as a whole was mirrored in the struggles of the feminist movement: “the definition of literary value privileged male writers’ engagement with warfare or politics over the more domestically centered literary works by female authors” (Knellwolf 199) just as the male endeavors were privileged over female endeavors. The feminist literary critic’s work is multidisciplinary, encompassing “a revisionist engagement with history and literary history, a revision of aesthetic standards and a radical critique of the representation of gender and gender roles as a part of a larger critique of cultural self-definition” (197). In the early years of feminist writing, many women “worked at the margins of the conventionally defined disciplines” as feminists were making inroads in established university programs. While, larger universities excluded women’s studies, lesser institutions created “space for courses specifically designed for women’s needs” (197).

CONCLUSION

From its early beginnings, women’s studies and feminism literary criticism have opened up new areas of scholarship. Second-wave feminism, criticized for focusing on the plight of middle class white women (Knellwolf 202), has entered a new phase and now recognizes minority women are multiply oppressed and multiply omitted. Additionally, feminist literary critics are abandoning binary ideas of gender and interrogating the role of gender and gender identification as it applies to literature. Feminist literary critics still seek to fill in the history of women’s writing.

More information: The Feminist Approach in Literary Criticism

WORKS CITED

9721-virginia-woolf.jpg. “Virginia Woolf Quotes.” QuoteAddict. http://quoteaddicts.com/topic/virginia-woolf-quotes/. Accessed 22 Sept. 2016.

Estroga, Ignatius Joseph. The Feminist Approach in Literary Criticism. 8 Jul. 2013. http://www.slideshare.net/josephestroga/the-feministapproachinliterarycriticism. Accessed 22 Sept. 2016. Slideshow.

Ginsberg, Alice E. The Evolution of American Women’s Studies Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2008.

Ju, Anna. “Women’s Studies at Cornell Evolves over 40-year History to Include Sexual Minorities.” Cornell Chronicle, 4 Nov. 2009, http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/11/cornell-looks-back-40-years-womens-studies. Accessed 21 Sept. 2016.

Knellwolf, Christa. “The History of Feminist Criticism.” Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectivesedited by Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Vol. 9. Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 193-205. Cambridge Histories Online. https://www-cambridge-org.proxy.lib.odu.edu/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/D5A1D2AF4184FBC9438F19EF62A01E09/9781139055376c15_p191-206_CBO.pdf/the-history-of-feminist-criticism.pdf. Accessed 11 Sept. 2016.

Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of Feminist Literary Criticism.” Feminist Criticism vol. 6 no. 1, 1980, pp. 1-25. JStor. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.odu.edu/stable/3177648. Accessed 9 Sept. 2016.

Plain, Gill and Susan Sellers, editors. Introduction. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 1-3.

A. Lorean Hartness

At ODU for my PhD

Tag Archives: university