Browsing by Subject "Women writers"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Asymptotic autobiography : fairy tales as narrative map in the writing of Zelda Fitzgerald(2009-08) McKetta, Elisabeth Sharp; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-; Miller, Lynn C.; Ali, Samer; Lesser, WayneWhen a writer, usually a woman, uses fairy tales as a veil through which to narrate a story of her life, I call this practice asymptotic autobiography. In mathematics, the asymptote is a straight line that a curve approaches increasingly closely, but never actually touches. I define “asymptotic autobiography” as a term for discussing any personal narrative that deliberately employs fiction in order to tell truth. In this inquiry, I examine the use of fairy tale language in giving voice to women writers’ autobiographical representations, using Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel and letters as the focus for my analysis. My research and critical analysis will examine how Save Me the Waltz, which Zelda Fitzgerald wrote while she was a psychiatric patient in the Phipps Clinic, uses fairy tales to provide a mapping of the many performances that autobiographical selfhood entails. By experimenting with open-ended fairy tale conventions instead of being limited by clinical truths, and by contextualizing her personal history in the realm of the imaginary, Fitzgerald removes her story from the psychiatric ward and places it safely in legend. The first three chapters of this dissertation show how, in sequence, the autobiographical self becomes free through the use of fairy tales in three stages: once the autobiographer has worked to separate herself from being bound by illness or clinical reality (Chapter One), she is free to make the decision of which self or selves she wishes to narrate and perform (Chapter Two); only once she has established her sense of self can the autobiographer then locate her plot, her map, and her narrative (Chapter Three). In Chapter Four, I offer an example of asymptotic autobiography in the form of a one-person play script that I wrote and performed about Zelda Fitzgerald’s life and hospitalization, using as a frame the fairy tale “The Swan Maiden.” This hybrid essay-performance combines the play script itself with personal writing of my own in which I describe the difficulties I had approaching and performing the rich material of Zelda’s life.Item Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland(2011-05) Bacon, Catherine M.; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Eastman, Caroline; Garrity, JaneMy dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.Item La institucionalización del rol materno durante gobiernos Autoritarios : respuestas de escritoras argentinas y brasileñas a la construcción patriarcal de género y nación(2009-05) Arce, Emilia Isabel; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950Women’s fictional narratives, besides influencing the process of nation building, also served to redefine the feminine gender and its incontrovertible contribution to the processes involved in imagining their communities. Although the systematic oppression suffered by women was effective, there were women writers who through negotiation gained access to male-dominated circles and achieved recognition. These women had a fundamental role in defying the stratification of gender in their society. They opposed every limitation imposed upon their gender, particularly the construction of the maternal role from a patriarchal perspective. In the works selected for this analysis, the authors reject the institutionalization of motherhood using as a narrative device motherless heroines who redefine femininity in their own terms and defy the patriarchal construct that confines motherhood to the seclusion of the home. Written in times of political upheaval, these novels emphasize the importance of women’s participation in the public sphere. In this dissertation I analyze four novels situated in or written during authoritarian regimes. The introduction provides the theoretical framework in which the definition of gender is discussed as well as the process of nation building in Latin America. I also include critical views on the topic of motherhood as women writers struggle with the representation of the maternal role and its implications in the construction of gender. In chapter one I discuss Argentinean writer Juana Manuela Gorriti’s La hija del mashorquero (1865); the second chapter analyzes Brazilian novelist Julia Lópes de Almeida’s A familia Medeiros (1892); chapter three is dedicated to the study of Argentinean Elvira Orpheé’s Uno (1961); the fourth chapter analyzes Brazilian Lygia Fagundes Telles’s As meninas (1973), so as to outline periods in which the patriarchal discourse concerning the role of women in society revolved around the traditional concepts of femininity and to reveal the insistence of women to obviate such concepts, specifically in terms of nation building. Through the detailed textual analysis of these novels, I aim to demonstrate the strategies used by these authors to openly defy the constructions of femininity through their critique of the socio-political systems of their times.Item Re-centering Central America : women writers undisplaced(2013-05) Boxwell, Regan Amanda; Arias, Arturo, 1950-"Re-centering Central America: Women Writers Undisplaced" endeavors to unpack and unravel the meaning, genealogy and implications of the US's patriarchal relationship with Central America, formative of a jumble of misconceptions of "otherness" on a global scale. This legacy is mirrored in the region's cultural production. Central American discourse itself has long ignored or marginalized "other" subjectivities. I trace a genealogy of Central American narrative discursivities by women to interrogate questions of female subjectivity and the inadequacy of hegemonic identitary formulations that often elide gender, ethnicity, and other regulatory trajectories in subject-formation. My dissertation is the first project in the US to examine how an undercurrent in which colonially derived social relations underwrite contemporary Central America is interrogated and re-visioned in literature produced by women. I focus on six Central American authors: Yolanda Oreamuno (Costa Rica), Claribel Alegría (El Salvador), Carmen Naranjo (Costa Rica), Rosario Aguilar (Nicaragua), Gloria Guardia (Panamá), and Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador). No systematic study has looked at how literary techniques and representations by these authors articulate a literary counter-statement to the patriarchal legacy informing Central American modernity between 1949 and the present, as well as to traditional formulations of subordinate subjectivities in which norms, rhetorics and assumptions of machismo and social exclusion of women inhabit and still animate the US's understanding of its inhabitants. My dissertation tracks the continuity between these authors' work to establish a problematization of sovereign subjectivity by refiguring the nature of the speech act as in flux, so as to eliminate authoritativeness and open up space for contestatary speech and agency. Judith Butler establishes that agency is achieved when the subordinated subject expropriates the "sovereign conceit" of the speech act, revealing discourses capable of destabilizing and even dismantling the epistemologies of the so-called "sovereign subject." By establishing a broad definition of sovereignty as any identitary construct that presupposes integral subjectivity or that attempts to impose such myths on subordinate subjects, I analyze the implications of these authors' narratives in destabilizing and revealing the farce of sovereign subjectivity.Item Reading and writing women : representing the femme de lettres in Stendhal, Balzac, Girardin and Sand(2011-05) Burkhart, Claire Lovell; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Bini, Daniela; Cauvin, Jean-Pierre; Johnson, Michael; Wilkinson, LynnThis dissertation explores the numerous literary representations of the femme de lettres during the first half of the nineteenth century in order to illustrate the complexities of women’s entrance into the male-dominated domain of literature and also to suggest the impact these fictional characters might have had on the reception of actual women writers as well as their omission from the century’s literary canon. The works that will be included in this analysis include: Mme de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, Honoré de Balzac’s Béatrix, La Muse du département and Illusions perdues, Delphine de Girardin’s La Canne de M. de Balzac, Napoline and La joie fait peur and George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, Lettres d’un voyageur and Un Hiver à Majorque. In compiling such diverse works of literature, it becomes clear that both male and female authors from the early nineteenth century were unable to envision a publicly embraced female genius. Although almost all of the fictional femmes de lettres in this study faced a destiny of professional silence, the reasons given for their failures are split between the male and female authors. For the male authors, the woman as a successful intellectual, artist or author was ultimately impossible because of her inability to combine her female body and psyche with the “masculine” pursuit of knowledge. Conversely, the female authors wrote characters whose inability to fully embrace a public literary or artistic career stemmed from society’s unwillingness to tolerate her exceptionality rather than from an inherent disconnect between genius and the female sex.Item Women’s writing and writing women in the seventeenth century : an examination of the works of Sibylle Schwarz and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler(2013-12) Ferguson, Angela Dionne; Hess, Peter AndreasThis dissertation is primarily concerned with women's writing in the mid-seventeenth century, comprising the years from 1624 to 1686. It covers the period immediately following Martin Opitz's vernacular literary reforms in Germany and takes as its primary subject the resultant increase in female authorship. It arises out of an interest in two separate but interrelated issues. The first is out of an interest in female literary production in Germany during the seventeenth century, specifically between 1624 and 1686, dates demarcated by the publication of Martin Opitz's Buch von der deutschen Poeterey and the publication of Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler's collection of poetry, Jungferlicher Zeitvertreiber. The second is the question of women's self-concept within a patriarchal society and the discursive strategies of female authors struggling "against complex odds" to "com[e] to written voice" (Olsen 9). In order to fully explore this subject, I have chosen to focus on the work of two poets, Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638) and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler (1657-1706?). Writing at different stages in this period and from dissimilar social positions, the two poets offer contrasting strategies of self-representation and self-authorization. By negotiating the demanding terrain of female authorship in a period inhospitable to female learning in different ways, they illustrate the tensions faced by female poets and the various strategies for overcoming the challenges they faced. I look first at the construction of female gender in the early modern period and the ways female writers could subtly shift the prevailing ideas and definitions to include the act of writing as an acceptable component of female identity. The analysis and comparison of the works of Schwarz and Zeidler also offers a glimpse into the changes in self-awareness and self-concept of female poets across the period.Item Writing for pleasure or necessity : conflict among literary women, 1700-1750(2011-05) Beutner, Katharine; Bertelsen, Lance; Barchas, Janine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Ezell, Margaret; Ingrassia, CatherineIn this dissertation, I examine antagonistic relationships between women writers in the first half of the eighteenth century, focusing on the works of Delarivier Manley, Martha Fowke Sansom, Eliza Haywood, and Laetitia Pilkington. Professional rivalry among women writers represents an under-studied but vital element of the history of print culture in the early eighteenth century. I argue that the shared burden of negotiating the complicated literary marketplace did not, as critics have at times suggested, inspire women who wrote for print publication to feel for one another a sisterly benevolence. Rather, fine gradations in social class, questions of genre status and individual talent, and -- perhaps most importantly -- clashing literary ambitions spurred early eighteenth-century women writers into vicious rivalries recorded in print and driven by print culture. Women documented their literary battles in poems, in prefaces, and in autobiographical texts replete with self-justification and with attacks on former friends or disappointing patronesses. This dissertation recognizes rivalry as a crucial mode of interaction between eighteenth-century literary women and analyzes the ways in which these professional women writers labored to defend themselves not just against patriarchal pressures but against one another. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of a more complete literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century by exploring how early eighteenth-century women writers imagined their own professional lives, how they imagined the professional lives of other women, and how they therefore believed themselves influenced (or claimed themselves influenced) by the support or detraction of other women. The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Delarivier Manley's career and writings, while the second two address the entangled writing lives of Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke Sansom. The concluding chapter briefly examines Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs. I investigate the way these women employed the practice of life-writing as a means of self-construction, self-promotion, and public appeal.