D. C. Greetham
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119937
- eISBN:
- 9780191671265
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses the problem of gender in textual scholarship and begins with the author sharing an incident in 1986, when a panel on ‘Sex, Text and Context’ was made to investigate how gender ...
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This chapter discusses the problem of gender in textual scholarship and begins with the author sharing an incident in 1986, when a panel on ‘Sex, Text and Context’ was made to investigate how gender might make a difference in editing procedures. The panel failed to confront the issue of whether there was a feminist ethic to editing, a way of handling texts that could make use of some of the subversive, anti-foundational, anti-patriarchal manoeuvres associated with écriture feminine. The chapter goes on to present the increase in writings on textual matters by feminist critics and reviews the most textually significant recent work in feminism and gender studies.Less
This chapter discusses the problem of gender in textual scholarship and begins with the author sharing an incident in 1986, when a panel on ‘Sex, Text and Context’ was made to investigate how gender might make a difference in editing procedures. The panel failed to confront the issue of whether there was a feminist ethic to editing, a way of handling texts that could make use of some of the subversive, anti-foundational, anti-patriarchal manoeuvres associated with écriture feminine. The chapter goes on to present the increase in writings on textual matters by feminist critics and reviews the most textually significant recent work in feminism and gender studies.
Charlotte Brunsdon
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159803
- eISBN:
- 9780191673702
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159803.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the language and concerns of three pioneering 1970s feminist commentators on soap opera. It suggests that the continuities between the work of the 1940s and the 1970s are ...
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This chapter examines the language and concerns of three pioneering 1970s feminist commentators on soap opera. It suggests that the continuities between the work of the 1940s and the 1970s are greater than is usually supposed. An analysis of literary criticism in the 1970s reveals that its focus was on the emerging figure of the feminist intellectual and her contradictory response to conventional femininity. It discusses the works of Carol Lopate, Michele Mattelart, and Tania Modleski.Less
This chapter examines the language and concerns of three pioneering 1970s feminist commentators on soap opera. It suggests that the continuities between the work of the 1940s and the 1970s are greater than is usually supposed. An analysis of literary criticism in the 1970s reveals that its focus was on the emerging figure of the feminist intellectual and her contradictory response to conventional femininity. It discusses the works of Carol Lopate, Michele Mattelart, and Tania Modleski.
Adriel M. Trott
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474455220
- eISBN:
- 9781474476874
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474455220.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter looks at the many issues that feminist critics have raised both to accuse Aristotle of misogyny and to defend Aristotle’s conception of the female, matter, and the feminine. This chapter ...
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This chapter looks at the many issues that feminist critics have raised both to accuse Aristotle of misogyny and to defend Aristotle’s conception of the female, matter, and the feminine. This chapter thus lays out the questions that set up the book: To what extent is Aristotle’s biology offering a positive role for the female and for matter in generation? To what extent does Aristotle’s biology influence the rest of his corpus? To what extent is Aristotle’s metaphysics normative, privileging form—and thus male—over matter—and thus female? To what extent is artifice the proper model of generation for Aristotle? The chapter thus looks at feminists who say Aristotle’s biology is sexist, those who say it is not, and thus who find the problem more fundamentally rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics.Less
This chapter looks at the many issues that feminist critics have raised both to accuse Aristotle of misogyny and to defend Aristotle’s conception of the female, matter, and the feminine. This chapter thus lays out the questions that set up the book: To what extent is Aristotle’s biology offering a positive role for the female and for matter in generation? To what extent does Aristotle’s biology influence the rest of his corpus? To what extent is Aristotle’s metaphysics normative, privileging form—and thus male—over matter—and thus female? To what extent is artifice the proper model of generation for Aristotle? The chapter thus looks at feminists who say Aristotle’s biology is sexist, those who say it is not, and thus who find the problem more fundamentally rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Keisha Lindsay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252041730
- eISBN:
- 9780252050404
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041730.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This dialectic between experience and politics sheds important light on the possibility of building coalitions among disadvantaged groups. Such coalitions are possible when social groups use a ...
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This dialectic between experience and politics sheds important light on the possibility of building coalitions among disadvantaged groups. Such coalitions are possible when social groups use a normative-critical understanding of power to interrogate the assumptions and demands associated with their own and others’ experience-based claims. Doing this allows ABMS’ supporters to recognize that they, like their feminist critics, make emancipatory and oppressive experiential claims. They are consequently united by a conundrum - how to reap the benefits without succumbing to the limitations of their respective claims. The end of this chapter concretizes this vision of coalition building by detailing a specific circumstance - a roundtable on ABMS in which supporters and critics assess the risks and rewards of constructing black boys as intersectionally oppressed.Less
This dialectic between experience and politics sheds important light on the possibility of building coalitions among disadvantaged groups. Such coalitions are possible when social groups use a normative-critical understanding of power to interrogate the assumptions and demands associated with their own and others’ experience-based claims. Doing this allows ABMS’ supporters to recognize that they, like their feminist critics, make emancipatory and oppressive experiential claims. They are consequently united by a conundrum - how to reap the benefits without succumbing to the limitations of their respective claims. The end of this chapter concretizes this vision of coalition building by detailing a specific circumstance - a roundtable on ABMS in which supporters and critics assess the risks and rewards of constructing black boys as intersectionally oppressed.
ANNA RICHARDS
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199267545
- eISBN:
- 9780191708398
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199267545.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter examines the new views about women which were put forward at this period by German medical writers and the French writers who influenced them, and they compare them with those which were ...
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This chapter examines the new views about women which were put forward at this period by German medical writers and the French writers who influenced them, and they compare them with those which were held a hundred years later, around 1900. It then focuses on discussions of female eating behaviour and wasting diseases in particular. In the context of the moral and philosophical views with which perceptions of the female body were inextricably bound up, it examines whether women's illness could sometimes have constituted a protest against gender stereotypes, as feminist critics have suggested.Less
This chapter examines the new views about women which were put forward at this period by German medical writers and the French writers who influenced them, and they compare them with those which were held a hundred years later, around 1900. It then focuses on discussions of female eating behaviour and wasting diseases in particular. In the context of the moral and philosophical views with which perceptions of the female body were inextricably bound up, it examines whether women's illness could sometimes have constituted a protest against gender stereotypes, as feminist critics have suggested.
Marilyn Butler
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198129684
- eISBN:
- 9780191671838
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129684.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Interest in Jane Austen has never been greater, but it is revitalised by the advent of feminist literary history. In a substantial new introduction the author places this book, which was first ...
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Interest in Jane Austen has never been greater, but it is revitalised by the advent of feminist literary history. In a substantial new introduction the author places this book, which was first published in 1975, within the larger tradition of post-war criticism, from the generation of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and F. R. Leavis to that of the now-dominant feminist critics. The book argues that Austen herself lived in contentious times. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, she served her literary apprenticeship in the 1790s, the decade of the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, an era in England of polemic and hysteria. Political partisanship shaped the novel of her youth, in content, form, and style. The book now examines the very different schools of writing about Austen, and finds in them some unexpected continuities, such as a willingness to recruit her to modern aims, but a reluctance to engage with her own history. When the book first came out, it attracted attention for its fresh, controversial approach to ideas on Austen. The new edition shows how the arrival of feminism has made the task of the literary historian more vital and challenging than ever.Less
Interest in Jane Austen has never been greater, but it is revitalised by the advent of feminist literary history. In a substantial new introduction the author places this book, which was first published in 1975, within the larger tradition of post-war criticism, from the generation of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and F. R. Leavis to that of the now-dominant feminist critics. The book argues that Austen herself lived in contentious times. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, she served her literary apprenticeship in the 1790s, the decade of the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, an era in England of polemic and hysteria. Political partisanship shaped the novel of her youth, in content, form, and style. The book now examines the very different schools of writing about Austen, and finds in them some unexpected continuities, such as a willingness to recruit her to modern aims, but a reluctance to engage with her own history. When the book first came out, it attracted attention for its fresh, controversial approach to ideas on Austen. The new edition shows how the arrival of feminism has made the task of the literary historian more vital and challenging than ever.
Rachel M. Brownstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231153911
- eISBN:
- 9780231527248
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231153911.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter begins by considering late twentieth-century feminist literary critics in order to account for the special status of Jane Austen and her novels in contemporary culture. From ...
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This introductory chapter begins by considering late twentieth-century feminist literary critics in order to account for the special status of Jane Austen and her novels in contemporary culture. From the beginning, feminist efforts to retrieve and revalue writers who had been overlooked by the patriarchal establishment in scholarship, criticism, and publishing were accompanied by new studies arguing for the importance of the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Celebrating the rich tradition of English women novelists before herself in A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf traced it back to Jane Austen, crediting her with inventing the “women's sentence.” As a great writer and a quintessentially English one, Austen has been regularly compared to Shakespeare. The shapes of her sentences have also influenced the way English is written and spoken. Personal interest in Austen began with the publication of her biography, titled Memoir (1870) by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.Less
This introductory chapter begins by considering late twentieth-century feminist literary critics in order to account for the special status of Jane Austen and her novels in contemporary culture. From the beginning, feminist efforts to retrieve and revalue writers who had been overlooked by the patriarchal establishment in scholarship, criticism, and publishing were accompanied by new studies arguing for the importance of the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Celebrating the rich tradition of English women novelists before herself in A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf traced it back to Jane Austen, crediting her with inventing the “women's sentence.” As a great writer and a quintessentially English one, Austen has been regularly compared to Shakespeare. The shapes of her sentences have also influenced the way English is written and spoken. Personal interest in Austen began with the publication of her biography, titled Memoir (1870) by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.
Elana Levine (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039577
- eISBN:
- 9780252097669
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039577.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as ...
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Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. This book brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these chapters show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. The book sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.Less
Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. This book brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these chapters show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. The book sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.
Kent L. Brintnall
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226074696
- eISBN:
- 9780226074719
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226074719.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these ...
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This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these representations—to understand how it secures, and subverts, prevailing fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Psychoanalytic discourse, especially that of Freud and Lacan, seeks to establish a gendered order organized around wholeness and lack. Although such discourse frequently undoes itself in its articulation, usually containing the very materials that make critical intervention possible, the move toward an equation of maleness with plenitude and femaleness with incompletion is undeniable and has made psychoanalysis legitimately suspect in the eyes of many feminist critics. In considering these materials, the author draws upon the work of Kaja Silverman. In The Acoustic Mirror Silverman studies the anxieties “lack” creates within film theory and psychoanalysis. She notes that both discourses enable masculine subjects to overcome lack's attendant displeasures by displacing it onto female subjects and bodies.Less
This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these representations—to understand how it secures, and subverts, prevailing fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Psychoanalytic discourse, especially that of Freud and Lacan, seeks to establish a gendered order organized around wholeness and lack. Although such discourse frequently undoes itself in its articulation, usually containing the very materials that make critical intervention possible, the move toward an equation of maleness with plenitude and femaleness with incompletion is undeniable and has made psychoanalysis legitimately suspect in the eyes of many feminist critics. In considering these materials, the author draws upon the work of Kaja Silverman. In The Acoustic Mirror Silverman studies the anxieties “lack” creates within film theory and psychoanalysis. She notes that both discourses enable masculine subjects to overcome lack's attendant displeasures by displacing it onto female subjects and bodies.
Alfred I. Tauber
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190651244
- eISBN:
- 9780190651275
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190651244.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
A review of the major theme – revising immunity within an ecological context that re-defines immune identity as a cognitive information processing function – is followed by summary review of ...
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A review of the major theme – revising immunity within an ecological context that re-defines immune identity as a cognitive information processing function – is followed by summary review of different versions of identity, namely, those offered by social critics, who deprecate the insular conception of individuality as a reflection of a cultural norm, and another by abstract artists, who deconstruct the body and place it fully contextualized in its environment to illustrate the conceit of autonomous selfhood.Less
A review of the major theme – revising immunity within an ecological context that re-defines immune identity as a cognitive information processing function – is followed by summary review of different versions of identity, namely, those offered by social critics, who deprecate the insular conception of individuality as a reflection of a cultural norm, and another by abstract artists, who deconstruct the body and place it fully contextualized in its environment to illustrate the conceit of autonomous selfhood.