scholarly journals From the female writer in A Room of One’s Own to the female reader in The Reader: feminist voices

Author(s):  
Cương Quyền Thạch Thị

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is the pioneers of the very first movement of feminism. Her work A Room of One's Own (1929) shows gender discrimination with discourse of feminism and of literary creativeness, and also thoughts for fighting for gender equality. For Woolf, a liberal writer is the one who has his/her own room to work and is adequately educated. Despite of the wide gap of generation, the novel The Reader (1995) by Bernhard Schlink (1944-) continued with feminism from the view of female readers. It also shows his view point of a liberal reader who has the right to participate in literary reception. As a continuation of Woolf, Schlink argues that the very basic step to all to become a free reader is to educate, to eliminate illiteracy and to foster cultural and social knowledge. It can be seen that the feminist voices in these two works have much in common, creating a deep feminist dialogue. We believe that link between them as well as between the works and the readers can evoke further feminist voices and discourses, contributing to the development of this approach.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-310
Author(s):  
Michael Hollington

This essay begins with a survey of attitudes towards Charles Dickens in the extended Stephen family, as these were inherited by the modernist writer Virginia Woolf. On the one hand, there is the strongly negative view of her Uncle Fitzy (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen), and the lukewarm, rather condescending opinion of her father Leslie Stephen. On the other, there is the legacy of enthusiastic attention and appropriation from William Makepeace Thackeray's two daughters – her aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie and (posthumously) Min, Leslie Stephen's first wife. In the second section I survey Woolf's critical writings on Dickens, adding a glance at the opinions of her husband Leonard. In both, there is an evolution towards greater attention and enthusiasm. Besides Woolf's familiar essay on David Copperfield (1849–50), I give prominence to lesser-known writings, in particular to her laudatory assessment and analysis of Bleak House (1852–3). The third and final part concerns signs of the influence of Dickens in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). The earlier, satiric part of the novel shows the impact both of Jane Austen and Dickens as ironists and humourists. During the tragic conclusion, influenced by a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen drops out, but Dickens is retained.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Débora Magalhães Cunha Rodrigues

RESUMO: Elisa Lispector escreveu inúmeros romances e contos, recebendo prêmios por alguns deles. A escritora, embora tenha explorado a construção de uma subjetividade feminina, é quase sempre lembrada pelos escritos autobiográficos, principalmente o romance No exílio de 1948. A crítica esteve mais atenta às narrativas que iluminavam episódios da vida de sua irmã caçula, Clarice Lispector, do que às especificidades de sua escrita. A obra e a trajetória de Clarice Lispector causaram sombra não só à obra de sua irmã como às de outras escritoras do mesmo período.  Neste artigo, questionamos o papel da crítica no apagamento do nome de Elisa Lispector na literatura brasileira que tomou o caso Clarice como excepcional, negando às escritoras, de um modo geral, um espaço para debater seus textos e subjetividades. Além da vinculação da obra da escritora à obra de sua irmã pela crítica literária, analisamos como a tradição literária falocêntrica contribuiu para este apagamento. Elisa Lispector contribuiu para o debate acerca do baixo número de publicações de escritoras, evocando Virginia Woolf e Simone de Beauvoir. Atuou para que as escritoras pudessem ter uma tradição em que se ancorar. Analisamos os romances O muro de pedras publicado em 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza de 1965, A última porta de 1975, Corpo a corpo de 1983 e do conto “Uma outra temporada no inferno” de seu último livro O tigre de bengala publicado em 1985, demonstrando como a escritora explorou os processos de emancipação feminina e os conflitos comuns a esta fase de transição.BEYOND A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: THE CASE ELISA LISPECTORABSTRACT: Elisa Lispector has written numerous novels and short stories, receiving awards for some of them. The writer, although she explored the construction of a female subjectivity, is almost always remembered for autobiographical writings, especially the novel No exílio of 1948. The criticism was more attentive to the narratives that illuminated episodes of the life of her younger sister, Clarice Lispector, than to the specificities of her writing. Clarice Lispector's work and trajectory cast a shadow not only on her sister's work but also on those of other writers of the same period. In this article, we question the role of criticism in the elimination of Elisa Lispector's name in Brazilian literature, which took Clarice as exceptional, denying writers, in general, a space to debate their texts and subjectivities. In addition to linking the writer's work to her sister's work by literary criticism, we analyze how the phallocentric literary tradition contributed to this elimination. Elisa Lispector contributed to the debate about the low number of writers' publications, evoking Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. It worked so that the writers could have a tradition in which to anchor themselves. We analyze the novels O muro de pedras published in 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza of 1965, A última porta of 1975, Corpo a corpo of 1983 and the short story "Uma outra temporada no inferno" from her last book O tigre de bengala published in 1985, demonstrating how the writer explored the processes of female emancipation and the conflicts common to this phase of transition.Keywords: Elisa Lispector; feminist criticism; Brazilian literature.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Hélène Fau

Abstract At the Ramsay’s Scottish summer home, where guests are promised an illusory trip to the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, a post-impressionist painter, indulges into portraying Mrs Ramsay. Throughout the novel, the portrait changes forms, starting as a moving tree in the first section ‘The Window’ and ending, after Mrs Ramsay’s death, as a single line in the very last page of the novel where Lily Briscoe sees it as completed. The “passage into abstraction” satisfies her for she executes the vision she had. The plot follows the same scheme, unfolding through shifting perspectives and oscillating between the figurative and abstract stream of consciousness of each character. It thus reflects Lily’s unstable portrait and paves the way for a deterritorialised writing. This paper will analyse how the “actes graphiques” (the drawn as well as the written items) mutate into an abstract – and therefore non- or a-gendered – line in order to release the un-articulated and un-lived antimainstream love between Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-266
Author(s):  
Anna Barton

In the opening passage ofA Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf catches herself, and is subsequently caught out, in a moment of reflection on the banks of a river, within the grounds of a barely fictionalised “Oxbridge University”:Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. (6–7)In this fictional account of her trespass on university property, Woolf forges a close association between the environment in which she does her thinking and what she thinks, so that body, mind, and text are shown to be engaged in the same work. Her thoughts, she suggests, have a physical weight: they bow her head to the ground. The landscape bows with her so that a momentarily surreal vista of flaming leaves and long-haired trees is at once the place she is sitting and the space of her imagination, and the “reflections” through which the undergraduate oars take on a double meaning as the boat floats through her consciousness and back out again. The interruption of the beadle causes her to lose her train of thought: it is a fish that jumps and then disappears back into the river. This reverie, which rehearses the lecture's central argument concerning the material conditions required for gender equality, identifies the university as a case in point. Oxbridge is experienced by Woolf's fictional avatar as a place where intellectual freedom is achieved within a series of carefully regulated spaces, and her essay balances the attraction and acknowledged value of these exclusive spaces against the experience of her own exclusion. As so often in her work, the geography of Woolf's prose is haunted by the Victorians, whose lyric voices she can only half hear as she sits at a college window. Her essay therefore invites a return to nineteenth-century accounts of university life that pay attention to the material, or formal, delineations of the university.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Juhana Juhana ◽  
Nur Qalbi ◽  
Sri Arfani

Abstract. This study aims to describe the gender inequality contained in the novel Death of an Ex-Minister by Nawal el Saadawi using gender theory by Mansour Fakih (2005) which includes marginalization, subordination, stereotype, violence, and workload. The method used was descriptive qualitative. The results showed that there was gender inequality that was manifested in four forms: marginalization, subordination, stereotyping, and violence. Marginalization occurs in the form of dismissals by male superiors to female employees who were considered to often express opinions that differ from them. Subordination was indicated by the position of women who were lower than men. Whereas, stereotyping occurred with the negative attachment of a husband to his wife that because he was the one who gave food he had the right to do anything to his wife. The violence occurred in the form of physical violence by a husband against his wife and sexual violence experienced by a woman who was raped by ten men. Keywords: Gender, Gender Inequality, the novel Death of an Ex-Minister


Author(s):  
Susan Sellers

This chapter traces Virginia Woolf’s development as a writer of non-fiction, focusing on her prolific output as an essayist. It sees close links between her ongoing experimentation with the novel form and the evolving form of her essays, and argues that her alterations in style were an integral aspect of her attempt to articulate a response to her largely Victorian inheritance, to the seismic shifts taking place in society and understanding in the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the politics and culture of the 1930s dominated by the rise of fascism. While the chapter ranges across all of Woolf’s essays, there is particular discussion of her 1920 A Room of One’s Own and her 1938 Three Guineas.


2007 ◽  
pp. 4-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Polterovich ◽  
V. Popov ◽  
A. Tonis

This paper compares various mechanisms of resource curse leading to a potentially inefficient use of resources; it is demonstrated that each of these mechanisms is associated with market imperfections and can be "corrected" with appropriate government policies. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that resource abundant countries have on average lower budget deficits and inflation, and higher foreign exchange reserves. Besides, lower domestic fuel prices that are typical for resource rich countries have a positive effect on long-term growth even though they are associated with losses resulting from higher energy consumption. On top of that resource abundance allows to reduce income inequalities. So, on the one hand, resource wealth turns out to be conducive to growth, especially in countries with strong institutions. However, on the other hand, resource abundance leads to corruption of institutions and to overvalued real exchange rates. On balance, there is no solid evidence that resource abundant countries grow more slowly than the others, but there is evidence that they grow more slowly than could have grown with the right policies and institutions.


This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.


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