Susan Hardy Aiken

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition. In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre. In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.

Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative

Making Worlds brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"—race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worlds both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worlds develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life—home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.

Gender, Metaphor, Materiality

Making Worlds

Karen Anderson

Myra Dinnerstein

Judy N. Temple

What happens when traditionally-trained academics begin to reconsider their disciplines in light of recent feminist scholarship? This book was written by academics outside Women's Studies programs who have changed their minds about the foundations of their disciplines. The authors share a commitment to explore the cultural construction of gender and the gendered construction of culture. Each chapter simultaneously examines and exemplifies the transformation of knowledge that resulted from their intensive study of feminist scholarship. Taken together, they not only demonstrate some of the range, variety, and intellectual vigor possible in discipline-specific reformulations, but also participate in the kind of trans-disciplinary thinking characteristic of the philosophy of Women's Studies from its inception. In the concluding chapter, the editors consider how efforts to transform traditional ways of knowing are inflected--and infected--by the politics of gender within academics.

Feminist Transformations of Knowledge

Changing Our Minds

Adele Marie Barker

Maya Koreneva

Ekaterina Stetsenko

Written over the course of the last four years, a lot of (ex)es obviously had to be added to this comparative study of contemporary Soviet and American women writers. In each of the volume's major sections two stories, one by a contemporary (then)Soviet woman and one by a contemporary American woman, become the focus of two interpretive essays, one by an American, one by an (ex)Soviet scholar. These dialogues are juxtaposed, in turn, with another set of encounters--those of the American and Soviet coauthors. Each section concludes with brief segments of transcribed discussions. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Susan Hardy Aiken

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