Persuasive Fictions: Feminist Narrative and Critical Myth

Copertina anteriore
Bucknell University Press, 2001 - 161 pagine
Challenges the current orthodoxy in feminist criticism and pedagogy that books change lives by reexamining key feminist texts that attempted to be instruments for both personal and social change in the lives of their readers. The book uses reception studies of writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Marilyn French to show that feminists' faith in the power of written or filmic texts as principal means to social change has been misplaced. It emphasizes important second wave works of popular feminism in order to argue that the cultural moment for belief in consciousness-raising texts has now passed, critiques feminist criticism's continued dependence on this model of oppositional possibility.

Dall'interno del libro

Sommario

Mary Wollstonecraft or the Politics of Being Read
26
The Womens Room and the Fiction of Consciousness
47
Jodie Foster Slays the Dragon The Accused and Rape in the Reel World
71
The Visible Margin Audre Lorde as IIcon
95
Afterword
128
Notes
132
Works Cited
148
Index
157
Copyright

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Pagina 28 - I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks; and prevail on them to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations. I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature, claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I entreat them to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for them!
Pagina 104 - There it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother's blood
Pagina 105 - Wherever the bird with no feet flew she found trees with no limbs." When the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother's mouth, then I either have to reassess the meaning of everything I have to say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words.
Pagina 42 - complacently observed" that "she had died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they were peculiarly liable.
Pagina 32 - Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.
Pagina 98 - It's a biomythography, which is really fiction. It has the elements of biography and history of myth. In other words, it's fiction built from many sources.
Pagina 31 - I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.
Pagina 78 - ... will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation

Informazioni sull'autore (2001)

Anna Wilson is a Lecturer in American Studies at Birmingham University, England.

Informazioni bibliografiche