The Irigaray Reader Pdf

[Marybelle Bailey]

Inthis definitive reader, prominent scholars reflect on how Luce Irigaray reads the classic discourse of Western metaphysics and also how she is read within and against this discourse. Her return to "the Greeks," through strategies of deconstructing, demythifying, reconstructing, and remythifying, is not a nostalgic return to the ideality of Hellenocentric antiquity, but rather an affirmatively critical revisiting of this ideality. Her persistent return and affective bond to ancient Greek logos, mythos, and tragedy sheds light on some of the most complex epistemological issues in contemporary theory, such as the workings of criticism, the language of politics and the politics of language, the possibility of social and symbolic transformation, the multiple mediations between metropolitan and postcolonial contexts of theory and practice, the question of the other, and the function of the feminine in Western metaphysics. With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social theory, comparative literature, or classics.

This is why women writers are not as palatable as men. Black writers are not as market-friendly as white writers. Queer writers may as well bank on a niche readership compared to heteronormative ones.

Perhaps the response to your writing is even more educative than the writing itself. When you are at your desk you will know this is hard, you will know it is dangerous, you will know it makes you cry when you discover that you can turn into language something that crushes your body. But the reaction from people you know once your writing is in print will tell you that you are pushing against the grain every step of the way.

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Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated... This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method.Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism... The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women.Feminist Theory, Women's WritingIn this rewarding book, Laurie A. Finke challenges assumptions about gender, the self, and the text which underlie fundamental constructs of contemporary feminist theory.A History of Feminist Literary CriticismThis book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of feminist writing and literary criticism.The New Feminist Literary StudiesThe New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today... The third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry.The Routledge Companion to IntersectionalitiesThe Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities is a dynamic reference source to the key contemporary analytic in feminist thought: intersectionality.Also see other recent eBooks discussing or using feminist theory in literature and scholar-recommended sources on Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray via Oxford Bibliographies.

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, published in 1999, is a key text for feminist theory, queer theory, and continental philosophy. She wrote several other books on gender and has a position as a professor at the University of California Berkeley. Her books are regarded as difficult to read due to their long, unstructured sentences and many references to other philosophers that it is assumed the reader knows. Regardless, I still think her work is valuable because of its contributions to the larger field of gender theory and how we think about gender today. I will give a summary of Gender Trouble, explaining the concepts she covers.

Caroline Crumpacker: I love what you've written about growing up in Texas and the various languages and vernaculars in your community and how they functioned socially. Can you talk about how this multiplicity, and all its political and social nuance, informs your work, your poetics. Also, it seems that your poetry works within and across registers of language to fill in some of the gaps. Can you talk about that?

Harryette Mullen: Yes, as one line in Sleeping with the Dictionary goes, "I've been licked all over by the English tongue." I think my childhood experience left me sensitive to the articulation of difference in language. I could see how language was used to assert, claim, and contest identity, especially for people with few other means of commanding attention. Human diversity is expressed through the multiplicity of spoken and written languages. With every word I speak or write, I'm aware that my language includes some people while excluding others. From childhood I've also appreciated the aesthetic, expressive, emotive, and pleasurable aspects of language, as well as the conflict and confusion we sometimes encounter when trying to communicate with others. I'm interested in the borderlines of language, where meanings contradict and overlap. A focus on the message itself is the poetic function, according to Jakobson. In poetry, I'm attentive to the multiple meanings of words, which is why I love puns, equivoque, the "double talk" of metaphor and simile. When I was growing up, my friends would never say, "Hey, your slip is showing." Instead they'd tell me, "It's snowing down south."

CC: Has the audience(s) you are addressing and the manner of that address changed in each of your books? You've written about present and future readers for your poetry, and of your hope that the children of women who are now illiterate will be future readers of your poems. Do you feel that Sleeping with the Dictionary engages that hope more directly than you have before?

HM: It seems that with each book my idea of audience has expanded. Travel and technology now connect writers to diverse and dispersed readers, and apparently my books are also reaching more people. Of course, the numbers don't compare to the audience for Spider-Man or Star Wars; but within the world of poetry I imagine myself addressing an audience that is larger and more diverse than ever. This idea challenges me to explore a more interactive, flexible, inclusive writing practice that might allow different readers to find meaning and pleasure in my work. I've often said that my fourth book, Muse & Drudge was crucial, because it seemed to unite readers of my first book, Tree Tall Woman, with the audience that was attracted to the formal innovation of Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T. Given my concern about literacy, I've often thought about the possibility of connecting writers, readers, and nonreaders through a practice that encompasses aspects of written and spoken language. To the extent that a text hails its readers, I've begun to consider how a poetic work might overcome the social barriers that reinforce what I've called "aesthetic apartheid." I think of Sleeping with the Dictionary as a very readable and accessible book, although I haven't necessarily employed the simplest or most transparent language in every poem.

HM: I'm paid for my work as a critic/professor, and I'd be starving and homeless if I had to live on my earnings as a poet. Beyond the economics, I hope my situation challenges me to be a creative critic and an intellectual poet.

HM: I write, ideally, for a diverse audience. As a reader, writer, and teacher I have many opportunities to consider the instability of interpretation when people don't necessarily share the same cultural knowledge or social background. I'm curious about the effects of allusion in such circumstances. My response to this challenge has been to leave space for divergent interpretations of unknown readers. I envision and I hope the work rewards such readers. Their activity possibly resembles the way I try, in an art gallery, to relate to a nonfigurative painting. In the case of visual art, or music, I often have an aesthetic response to a work without any sense of comprehension. I don't always need complete understanding to get pleasure from the work. In a similar way, a poem is more than the communication of a specific idea. I wouldn't privilege a singular reading, although I'm always happy to discuss intentions and devices in regard to a particular poem or passage. I can recall contexts, sources in literary or popular culture, and personal memories beyond the surface of language in a poem. I think I'm more interested in the process of creating and discovering meaning through the activity of reading and writing. Often I work improvisationally, sampling and collaging fragments of written and spoken discourse. I regard conventional expressions, such as clichs, proverbs, jingles, and slogans, as linguistic "readymades" that I recycle in my work. I like to use puns and other kinds of polysemy and ambiguity to stretch the limits of meaning. I'm working with something intrinsic to language, the fact that meaning is socially and historically constructed and that many words have more than one signification, often including culturally specific meanings particular to a social class, ethnic group, or other community constituted through shared understanding. My recent work tries to navigate along the linguistic borders where a word or phrase can mean one thing or another to different audiences.

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