Author: Alison Fell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351197614
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
"The concept of motherhood emerges strongly in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc and Annie Ernaux, whose work is examined here in the light of current debates about women's reproductive function and the longstanding glorification of the mere au foyer in France, driven by fear of a falling population. In this interdisciplinary study of twentieth-century French women's writing, Fell uncovers tensions at the heart of the literary critique. She shows these authors challenging the patriarchal view of motherhood as the sole justification for a woman's existence while at the same time confronting the conflict inherent in their relationship with their own mothers. A survey of theoretical and historical material demonstrates vividly that the changing concept of motherhood remains a problematic and highly contentious issue for French feminists, whether writing in 1940 or 1999."
Author: Shannon M. Mussett
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438444567
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Despite a deep familiarity with the philosophical tradition and despite the groundbreaking influence of her own work, Simone de Beauvoir never embraced the idea of herself as a philosopher. Her legacy is similarly complicated. She is acclaimed as a revolutionary thinker on issues of gender, age, and oppression, but although much has been written weighing the influence she and Jean-Paul Sartre had on one another, the extent and sophistication of her engagement with the Western tradition broadly goes mostly unnoticed. This volume turns the spotlight on exactly that, examining Beauvoir's dialogue with her influences and contemporaries, as well as her impact on later thinkers—concluding with an autobiographical essay by bell hooks discussing the influence of Beauvoir's philosophy and life on her own work and career. These innovative essays both broaden our understanding of Beauvoir and suggest new ways of understanding canonical figures through the lens of her work.
Author: A. Allen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
According to Allen, motherhood and citizenship are terms that are closely linked and have been redefined over the past century due to changes in women's status, feminist movements, and political developments. Mother-child relationships were greatly affected by political decisions during the early 1900s, and the maternal role has been transformed over the years. To understand the dilemmas faced by women concerning motherhood and work, for example, Allen argues that the problem must be examined in terms of its demographic and political development through history. Allen highlights the feminist movements in Western Europe - primarily Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and explores the implications of the maternal role for women's aspirations to the rights of citizenship. Among the topics Allen explores the history of the maternal role, psychoanalysis and theories on the mother-child relationship, changes in family law from 1890-1914, the economic status of mothers, and reproductive responsibility.
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209719X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
"The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings brings to English-language readers literary writings--several previously unknown--by Simone de Beauvoir. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of Beauvoir's career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into Beauvoir's writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?" Prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales,La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years are also available in English for the first time, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars. Contributors are Meryl Altman, Elizabeth Fallaize, Alison S. Fell, Sarah Gendron, Dennis A. Gilbert, Laura Hengehold, Eleanore Holveck, Terry Keefe, J. Debbie Mann, Frederick M. Morrison, Catherine Naji, Justine Sarrot, Liz Stanley, Ursula Tidd, and Veronique Zaytzeff.
Author: Gill Rye
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317235460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also includes essays that examine representations of motherhood in philosophy, art, social policy, and film. The book’s driving contention is that, through intersecting with other fields and disciplines, literature and the study of literature have an important role to play in nuancing dialogues around motherhood, by offering challenging insights and imaginative responses to complex problems and experiences. This is demonstrated throughout the volume, which covers a range of topics including: discursive and visual depictions of pregnancy and birth; the impact of new reproductive technologies on changing family configurations; the relationship between mothering and citizenship; the shaping of policy imperatives regarding mothering and disability; and the difficult realities of miscarriage, child death, violence, and infanticide. The collection expands and complicates hegemonic notions of motherhood, as the authors map and analyse shifting conceptions of maternal subjectivity and embodiment, explore some of the constraining and/or enabling contexts in which mothering takes place, and ask searching questions about what it means to be a ‘mother’ in Europe today. It will be of interest not only to those working in gender, women’s and feminist studies, but also to scholars in literary and cultural studies, and those researching in sociology, criminology, politics, psychology, medical ethics, midwifery, and related fields.
Author: Gill Rye
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 0874130409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Mothers have been both idealized and demonized in Western cultures. With Simone de Beauvoir's feminist analysis of motherhood in The Second Sex as her point of departure, Rye (Germanic and Romance studies, U. of London) studies how French autobiographical and fictional narratives of mothering since 1990 differ from those told about them. In the context of societal changes, she explores themes including loss and trauma related to childbirth literally and figuratively, ambivalence and guilt, power and powerlessness, and lesbian and single parenting in the works of Christine Angot, Genevieve Brisac, Marie Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens, Leila Marouane, and Marie Ndiaye among others.
Author: Susan Bainbrigge
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042018453
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Aims to re-evaluate Simone de Beauvoir's extensive autobiographical ouvre, exploring its place in relation to the French autobiographical canon. This study presents readings, which engage critically with existentialism, feminist theory, and autobiographystudies generally, in particular focusing on the question of 'autothanatography'.
Author: Emma Cheatle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317084039
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Part-Architecture presents a detailed and original study of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre through another seminal modernist artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Aligning the two works materially, historically and conceptually, the book challenges the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, makes original spatial and social accounts of its inhabitation in 1930s Paris, and presents new architectural readings of the Large Glass. Through a rich analysis, which incorporates creative projects into history and theory research, the book establishes new ways of writing about architecture. Designed for politically progressive gynaecologist Dr Jean Dalsace and his avant-garde wife, Annie Dalsace, the Maison de Verre combines a family home with a gynaecology clinic into a ‘free-plan’ layout. Screened only by glass walls, the presence of the clinic in the home suggests an untold dialogue on 1930s sexuality. The text explores the Maison de Verre through another radical glass construction, the Large Glass, where Duchamp’s complex depiction of unconsummated sexual relations across the glass planes reveals his resistance to the marital conventions of 1920s Paris. This and other analyses of the Large Glass are used as a framework to examine the Maison de Verre as a register of the changing history of women’s domestic and maternal choices, reclaiming the building as a piece of female social architectural history. The process used to uncover and write the accounts in the book is termed ‘part-architecture’. Derived from psychoanalytic theory, part-architecture fuses analytical, descriptive and creative processes, to produce a unique social and architectural critique. Identifying three essential materials to the Large Glass, the book has three main chapters: ‘Glass’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Air’. Combining theory text, creative writing and drawing, each traces the history and meaning of the material and its contribution to the spaces and sexuality of the Large Glass and the Maison de Verre. As a whole, the book contributes important and unique spatial readings to existing scholarship and expands definitions of architectural design and history.
Author: Angela Kimyongür
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351142941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history. By showing that the erasure of women's texts from literary and cultural history was not accidental but was ideologically motivated, the essays explicitly and implicitly contribute to debates surrounding canon formation. Other important topics are women's political activism during the period, antifascism, the contributions made by female journalists, the politics of literary production, genre, women's relationship with and contributions to the avant-garde, women's professional lives, and women's involvement in voluntary associations. In bringing together the work of scholars whose fields of expertise are diverse but whose interests converge on the inter-war period, the volume invites readers to make connections and comparisons across the whole spectrum of women's political, social, and cultural activities throughout Europe.
Author: Paul Mitchell
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8437083974
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Sylvia Plath es una de las poetas más conocidas y controvertidas del siglo XX. Desde su muerte en 1963, el debate crítico sobre su obra ha sido animado y, en ocasiones, incluso hostil. Esta obra ilustra cómo leer a Plath desde una perspectiva alternativa, utilizando la teoría de Julia Kristeva sobre el lenguaje político, y que permite una apreciación de los poemas que va más allá de lo biográfico al hacer énfasis, en cambio, en los textos; de ese modo, se engrana con la primera persona como una herramienta heurística compleja e inestable. Al explorar los poemas en términos de su trascendencia en lugar de centrarse exclusivamente en su significado explora la manera en la que la obra de Plath produce una crisis de subjetividad oratoria y, a partir de ahí, emerge la naturaleza «revolucionaria» de la voz poética.
