What does a woman want? : reading and sexual difference

Bibliographic Information

What does a woman want? : reading and sexual difference

Shoshana Felman

Johns Hopkins University Press, c1993

  • : hbk
  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hbk ISBN 9780801846175

Description

"What does a woman want?" - the question Freud formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte - is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire. She also examines texts by Sigmund Freud and Honore de Balzac which dramatize, each in its own way, a male encounter with femininity as difference - a male experience of femininity as precisely the emergence of the unexpected, baffling and not always conscious question - "What does a woman want?"

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What Does a Women Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading Chapter 2. Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy Chapter 3. Textuality and the Riddle of Bisexuality Chapter 4. Competing Pregnancies: The Dream from which Psychoanalysis Proceeds Chapter 5. With Whom Do You Believe Your Lot is Cast? Woolfe, de Beauvoir, Rich and the Struggle for Autobiography Notes Index
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780801846205

Description

'What does a woman want?'-the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte-is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What Does a Women Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading Chapter 2. Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy Chapter 3. Textuality and the Riddle of Bisexuality Chapter 4. Competing Pregnancies: The Dream from which Psychoanalysis Proceeds Chapter 5. With Whom Do You Believe Your Lot is Cast? Woolfe, de Beauvoir, Rich and the Struggle for Autobiography Notes Index

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