The feminist difference : literature, psychoanalysis, race, and gender
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The feminist difference : literature, psychoanalysis, race, and gender
Harvard University Press, 1998
- : hbk
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780674001916
Description
Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passe, feminism today seems becalmed without being calm. This is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture--yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In fresh readings of a wide array of texts--legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical--renowned literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point.
Employing surprising juxtapositions, The Feminist Difference looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective; at poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's rich, stimulating, unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--moments that re-emerge here as sources of a revitalized critical awareness.
In the final analysis, Johnson argues, literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book literature appears not as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.
Table of Contents
Introduction Literary Differences: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure? The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut The Re(a)d and the Black: Richard Wright's Blueprint 'Aesthetic' and 'Rapport' in Toni Morrison's Sula Gender and Poetry Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice: Phillis Wheatley and the Genealogy of African-American Poetry Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore Muteness Envy The "Voice" of the Author Lesbian Spectacles: Reading Sula, Passing, Thelma and Louise, and The Accused The Alchemy of Style and Law The Postmodern in Feminism: A Response to Mary Joe Frug Notes Credits Index
- Volume
-
: hbk ISBN 9780674298811
Description
Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passe, this text argues that feminism in the late 1990s seems becalmed without being calm. It is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture - yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In readings from an array of texts - legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical and psychonalytical - literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point. She argues that literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book the literature does not appear as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Literary differences - psychoanalysis, race and gender: is female to male as ground is to figure?
- the quicksands of the self - Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut
- the re(a)d and the black - Richard Wright's blueprint
- "aesthetic" and "rapport" in Toni Morrison's "Sula". Part 2 Gender and poetry: euphemism, understatement and the passive voice -genealogy of African-American poetry
- gender and poetry - Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
- muteness envy. Part 3 The "voice" of the author: lesbian spectacles - reading "Sula", "Passing", "Thelma and Louise" and "The Accused"
- the alchemy of style and law
- the postmodern in feminism - a response to Mary Joe Frug.
by "Nielsen BookData"