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"Women philosophers Fiction."
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Sisyphean or Medusan: The Absurd Hero in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea each create a liminal space wherein the traditional absurd in Camusian sense is both discernable and modified. While the male-female interactions in the novels correspond to the interactive nature of the moment of absurd recognition, the female characters of both novels manifest the same sense of lucidity and constant consciousness that constitutes the essence of absurd heroism. Thus, by casting female heroes as opposed to male ones, Rhys's aforementioned novels introduce the notion of gender and heterogeneity into the absurd. As such, Sisyphus's labor-ridden and mainly corporeal struggle, no longer the sole representative of the absurd, is counterpointed with that of female characters such as Sasha, Antoinette, Christophine, and Amelie whose absurd experiences are more Medusan than Sisyphean.
Journal Article
A distant view of everything
\"In this latest installment of Alexander McCall Smith's ever-delightful and perennially best-selling series, amateur sleuth and philosopher Isabel Dalhousie is called upon to help when a matchmaker begins to question her latest match. A new baby brings an abundance of joy to Isabel Dalhousie and her husband, Jamie--but Isabel's almost four-year-old son, Charlie, is none too keen on his newborn brother. In fact, Charlie refuses to acknowledge Magnus, and Isabel must find a way to impress upon her older son the patience and understanding that have served as guiding principles in her own life. These are, of course, the qualities that bring Rosemary Hipple, an old acquaintance of Isabel's, to seek her help in a tricky situation. Rosemary is something of a matchmakerand has brought together a cosmetic surgeon and a successful banker at her most recent dinner party. But new information comes to light about the cosmetic surgeon that causes Rosemary to doubt the auspiciousness of the match. Isabel agrees to find out more, but her inquiries takean unexpected turn, and she starts to wonder which of the two she should be investigating after all. As ever, her intelligence, quick wit, and deep empathy for others will come to her aid as she grapples with the issues that are her bread and butter: friendship and its duties, the obligation of truthfulness, and the importance of perspective\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Undoing Gender Performativities in Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero
Physician, psychiatrist, and Marxist activist for women's rights, Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) published fiction and non-fiction exposing how a capitalistic, phallocratic social order keeps Egyptian women in thrall to men through violent suppression. Women are exploited by men, who see women as weak and prey on these presumed docile subordinates in a display of masculinity. Deciphering the effects of this gendered performativity through the lens of Judith Butler, El Saadawi's novel Woman at Point Zero (1977/2015a), or Ferdaous, une Voix en Enfer (El Saadawi, 1977/2007) in French, provides a narrative whose significance is amplified by Butlerian theory. The protagonist, whose voice is filtered through the agency of an amanuensis, struggles to perform and define womanhood or femininity, only to claim liberation by murdering an antagonist and assuming a stoic posture vis-a-vis her death by hanging. In other words, repeated attempts to undo gender in El Saadawi's hierarchical society fail. Nonetheless, as Firdaus rebels against the rules of feminine behavior, she dismantles the common assumption that female genital mutilation (FGM), imposed as a tool of patriarchal power, inevitably results in disability. Clitoridectomy certainly leads to a recurring sense of dislocation and haunting loss, yet Firdaus flouts victimhood and remains mutinous despite discrimination, rape, marital abuse, and physical violence. Breaking with gender norms, she refuses abjection through her own initiative by deploying her body as a weapon, enticing her prey, and performing the \"feminine evil\" projected on all women since Eve by a usurped patriarchal power.
Journal Article
The quiet side of passion
\"Isabel finds herself befriended by Patricia, a single mother whose son, Basil, goes to school with Isabel's son. Isabel discovers that Basil is the product of an affair Patricia had with a well-known Edinburgh organist, also named Basil, who was, rumor has it, initially reluctant to contribute financially to the child's upkeep. Though Isabel doesn't really like Patricia, she tries to be civil and supportive, but when she sees Patricia in the company of an unscrupulous man who peddles fake antiquities, her suspicions are aroused and she begins to investigate the paternity of Basil Jr. When Isabel takes her suspicions to Basil Sr., she finds that, although paying child support is taking a severe financial toll on him, he likes the idea of being the boy's father and, in fact, wishes he could have more of a relationship with Basil Jr. Patricia, however, has no interest in Basil Sr. taking a more hands-on role in Basil Jr.'s parenting, even as she continues to accept his financial support. Should Isabel help someone who doesn't want to be helped? As Isabel navigates this ethically-complex situation, she is also dealing with her niece, Cat, who has taken up with a tattoo artist. Isabel considers herself open-minded, but has Cat pushed it too far this time? As ever, Isabel must use her kindness and keen intelligence to determine the right course of action\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
'Feeling Thought': Exploring the Materiality of the Mind in A. S. Byatt's Fairy Tales
Through the analysis of \"Cold\" (1998), \"A Stone Woman\" (2003), and \"The People in the House in the House\" (2009), the article explores how A. S. Byatt uses the fairy-tale genre's familiarity with the marvelous to make the interdependence of body and mind more visible, by featuring impossible creatures, fantastic metamorphoses, and clashes between scales. In her fairy tales, Byatt's reflection on the embodied mind intersects with her interest in materiality with quite unique results compared to her realist fiction. Using the idea of \"feeling thought\" as fil rouge, the article traces a connection between the materiality of represented bodies and minds and the metafictional awareness of the materiality of stories themselves as composed of reused motifs and strategies.
Journal Article
Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Ernaux, in their respective works titled The Years , undertake an exploration of the shifting experience of women across two different periods of profound historical change. Reading the texts through the lens of Jacques Rancière's concept of the \"distribution of the sensible,\" allows us ask to what extent works of literature such as these not only trace the shifting elements of a particular distribution of the sensible, but also provoke a change in that distribution by destabilizing and disrupting the smooth, unthought continuance of any such distribution. In doing so, we can attain a greater understanding of the complex historical determiners of individual experience and evaluate the possibility of undermining and overcoming those ingrained modes of experience.
Journal Article
Relocating Early Modern Women: Teaching Margaret Cavendish to a Broader Audience
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, can be called many things: writer, poet, philosopher, woman, Royalist, eccentric rule-breaker, scientific collaborator, utopian thinker, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, access to her writings, typically her
The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World,
are often limited in academic settings to courses centered on the seventeenth century, early modern utopian literature, Restoration literature, and possibly an early modern women writers class. Though these are all wonderful course topics, they are often upper-division courses specifically designed for English majors of the early modern period. Limiting Cavendish to only these courses means that most university students will not come across her texts, even if their institution requires at least one English elective course. Furthermore, Cavendish tends to be excluded from entry-level English courses because these courses are often designed around contemporary themes and texts that target students from diverse academic disciplines and non-English fields of study. Additionally, Cavendish is often seen as inaccessible to a wide audience because her writing style and philosophical experimentations can be difficult to process. In typical English classes, student understanding of literature is often assessed by requiring them to write academic essays that adhere to a very traditional structure, which can be intimidating to non-English majors. In order to introduce Cavendish to a broader student body, this essay will examine teaching her texts through multi-modal, student-centered, creative pedagogy using digital, visual, written, and verbal expressions that go beyond the traditional academic essay. A more diverse pedagogical approach to teaching Cavendish ensures that she can be read alongside, and in conversation with, more contemporary writers and texts.
Journal Article
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and the Künstlerroman Tradition
In the process, this theory also interweaves sf's pronounced but seemingly incompatible strands of utopian and Marxist thought.1 Leveraging the revolutionary, utopian potential linked to the figure of the Romantic artist but frequently denied art (for example, by those theorists for whom art serves largely to reproduce ideology), The Dispossessed parlays science's utilitarian function into an artistic process that imaginatively transcends its material and political origins, rehabilitating both science and art within a generic frame that is at once familiar and alien, conventional and revisionary. Art in its ideal form becomes a synthesis of artistic means and scientific ends with the potential to transcend existing ideologies altogether, which is perhaps to say that the novel's utopian politics-long the focal point of literary criticism about The Dispossessed-proceed from its theory of art, not vice versa. While the novel may leave readers with an ambiguous vision of utopia's scientific ends, and while my own analysis may introduce new tensions between the competing cultures, theories of art, and political dispensations that condition these ends, it is unambiguous enough about the value of the artistic processes that have made these outcomes a possibility in the first place. [...]Le Guin does not simply use the figure of the artist to make fictive science understandable or even alluring to the public, as other postwar writers or even scientists had done in the preceding decades (the latter as if out of an acute sense of pen envy).3 She also uses science and the figure of the scientist as metaphors to make art and the role of the artist comprehensible to her own world-a world where art, not science, seemed to be in need of the most justification.
Journal Article
Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading
Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy. This essay advocates instead for an approach that sees literary representation and readerly attention as interanimating and that considers teaching an important aspect of an ethics of reading. To support these positions, I turn to Katherena Vermette’s 2016 novel The Break, which both represents the urgent injustice of sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls and also metafictionally comments on the ethics of witnessing. Describing how I read with my students the novel’s insistent thematization of face-to-face encounters and practices of attention as an invitation to read with Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, I explicate the text’s self-aware commentary on both the need for readers to resist self-enlargement in their encounters with others’ stories and also the danger of generalizing readerly responsibility or losing sight of the material realities the text represents. I source these challenges both in the novel and in my students’ multiple particularities as readers facing the textual other. Ultimately, the essay argues for a more careful attention to which works we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics, and which theoretical frames we bring into classroom conversations.
Journal Article