|
 |
|
Writing Selves Contemporary Feminist Autography Jeanne Perreault |
|
|
Maps the intersection between autobiography and feminist discourse. Why "autography"? Because there really is no genre for feminist self-writing. This is the territory, between autobiography and feminist thought, that Jeanne Perreault marks out. Writing Selves retheorizes ideas of self, identity, and community as embodied and textualized forces of change. In the writers under study, "selvings" intersect the discourses of history, the law, and the sexual and racial body. Looking to Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals, Kate Millet's The Basement, Adrienne Rich's later prose and poetry, and Patricia Williams's "diary," among other works, Perreault compellingly examines writing as a significant element in the processes of self-making. Exploring the shifting boundaries of feminist communities, Perreault demonstrates how an intense reciting of "I" and "we" allows the reconception of an ethically informed subjectivity. Scholarly and powerfully argued, Writing Selves and the concept of autography make a major contribution to the questions informing the poetics and politics of identity. "Whether or not one shares Perreault's faith in what the processes of autography can accopmlish, one will find her close readings of texts engrossing." —Biography "Perrault focuses on four authors—Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Kate Millet, and Patricia Williams—who dwell on the material and embodied particulars of lived experience and who succed in translating those specificities into 'textual configurations of subjectivity rather than narratives of life history." —Signs "Illuminating and provocative." —a/b:Auto/Biography Studies Jeanne Perreault is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is coeditor, with Sylvia Vance, of Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada (1990). 176 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1995 |
||
OUT OF PRINT