The following is Tara Roeder's Critical
Preface from 2004, which several faculty readers felt was very
interesting (note: it should have an MLA Works Cited, but it does
not):
Tara Roeder
Master’s Portfolio
Critical Preface
March 2004
Shake Them Like Apple Trees:
The Problem With Angular Essences, Romantic Poets, and Mechanical
Men
“I would like the culture of the subject to which I belong…to
progress toward a culture of the sexed subject and not towards a
thoughtless destruction of subjectivity.”--Luce Irigaray
“Let us try as quickly as possible to abandon these binary
distinctions which never make any sense.” --Hélene Cixous
"The idea of torquing or twisting or permuting or turning or
curving of angles or points of view gives you some idea of the
prose prosody I'm proposing." --Charles Bernstein
Over the past two years, I’ve become increasingly invested in
re-visiting and re-configuring diverse fictions from a feminist
standpoint, exploring places where problematic binaries can be
challenged as stories of feminisms, modernisms, and masculinisms
converge and complicate each other. The thread that links the
three papers I’ve chosen for this project together is their
invocation of alternate ways of re-visioning traditionally
masculinist projects—the sublime, modernism, Italian
futurism. To varying degrees, each paper is committed to
examining competing stories of masculinity and femininity within a
larger theoretical framework of what I would tentatively call a
neo-humanistic feminism, a commitment to a feminism that re-asserts
the importance of the individual subject in a way that also allows
for the respect of difference. Although I’m
attracted to the work of a number of diverse feminist critics, Luce
Irigaray’s call for sexed subjecthood and Hélene Cixous’s
commitment to finding a language capable of constantly
re-negotiating the boundaries between self and other in a critical
way have especially impacted my development as a thinker/writer,
and I engage with a number of their texts in the papers I’ve
submitted for this portfolio. Each paper enacts a potential
way out of a problematic binary and offers an (at times tentative,
but ultimately hopeful) alternative to dualistic thinking.
“She Has Had Her Vision: Female Writing and the
Androgynous Artist in Woolf” is from my first semester as a
graduate student, and although it doesn’t exactly veer into
uncharted territory, I chose to revise it because it showcases an
engagement with feminist theory that has continued to be an
integral part of my work. I’m very invested, personally, in
the texts of female modernists like Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf,
and this paper gave me the opportunity to explore the feminist
poetics of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse in conjunction with some of the seminal texts of
French feminism. The paper centers on a discussion of Woolf’s
vision of the female artist transcending the male/female binary of
patriarchy by achieving a psychic androgyny that hinges on the
ability to see simultaneously from a multiplicity of perspectives,
a sort of literary cubism. While I’m skeptical of the
ostensibly apolitical stance of Woolf’s female artist (and
perturbed by Woolf’s own racism/classism), I still see enormous
value in the potential of her work to challenge western masculinist
assumptions about language, women, and history.
Structurally speaking, I needed to revise the paper in order to
communicate a more coherent thesis earlier on; instead of waiting
until page four to mention Cixous and Irigaray, I now open with a
discussion of some of the basic principles of l’écriture
féminine that act as a framework for much of my discussion of
Woolf. I feel the basic claims I make throughout the original
paper are tenable, although in several places in the revised
version I strive to express them in slightly more nuanced
ways. (I was especially concerned about one implicit
suggestion I hadn’t intended to make, which was an inadvertent
endowment of “female” space with a solely “private” function,
divorced from a social or public sphere, on pages six and seven in
the original.) I also incorporate a discussion of Cam’s role
at the end of To the Lighthouse, something I neglected to
do in the original. Although the claims I make in the paper
are far from revolutionary, its exploration of a female modernism
and its focus on a “female” language that disrupts phallocentrism
highlight what has become a major interest as I continue to develop
my own critical approach.
“Sublimes of Unity and Difference: Transcending the Binary of
Patricia Yaeger’s Toward A Female Sublime” explores what
it might mean to subject the traditionally masculine project of the
sublime to re-vision, although it questions the feasibility of a
feel-good “female sublime” that can oust the oedipal sublime from
its throne with the power of hand-holding. It basically
challenges the binary coupling of male and female sublimes enacted
in Patricia Yaeger’s essay “Toward a Female Sublime,” proposing
instead two possible ways to transcend dualism. I use the
language of Cixous to discuss the possibility for a sublime of
endless difference, and look both to (the very dead) Longinus and
the (not dead) Lee Edelman for a discussion of a sublime of
unity. The paper hinges on the possibility of finding a way
to talk about the sublime that avoids the rhetoric of domination
but also refuses to erase the tension and difference intrinsic to
the sublime experience.
The lingering problem of the paper is its suggestion that
language can function to (however temporarily) transcend gender
difference. As my relationship to feminist theories has
evolved, I’ve become more hesitant about making such a claim;
although the possibility of a text that can function transportively
irrespective of its reader’s gender remains attractive, the way
that language itself functions to conceal difference is a problem
of which I’m now more aware, and with which I consistently
grapple. I chose not to incorporate this particular anxiety
into my revision, however, because the more optimistic reading of
the relationship between language and gender in my initial paper
still strikes me as necessary. (Frankly, while re-reading my
three papers, I was somewhat gladdened by the way that, as a whole,
they tend to reflect a relatively hopeful commitment to re-vision
rather than hip, sardonic despair, and that was something I didn’t
want to lose.)
“A World of Iron and Coal: The Eroticized Futurist
Machine and Lawrence’s Politics of Simultaneous Orgasm” reflects a
(potentially risky) investment in using feminist theory to not only
challenge, but also to salvage, in a meaningful way, certain
male-authored modernist texts. (As someone who was actually
once quite fond of T. S. Eliot, I feel that it’s important to
consistently negotiate between my attraction to certain texts and
my resistance to their masculinist rhetoric.) The paper
explores the misogyny of Marinetti’s futurist rhetoric, comparing
his rejection of heterosexual desire and procreation with D. H.
Lawrence’s essentialist vision of male/female mutuality. I
first offer the visual art of Francis Picabia, which employs
Marinetti’s imagery in a problematized way, as a possible means to
complicate the futurist vision of the eroticized machine/absent
female, ultimately turning to Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and its
ironic, feminist appropriation of Marinetti’s vision to re-think
the gendered politics of futurism. I challenge the
problematic male/female, active/passive binary of Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterly’s Lover, as well (although obviously I’m
ultimately more sympathetic to Lawrence’s insistence on gendered
bodies, however sexist, than to Marinetti’s fantasy of a world of
machine-men.) I use the work of Cixous and Irigaray, which I
believe richly complicates Lawrence’s binary vision without
sacrificing his important commitment to reciprocal desire, as an
alternative not only to problematic modernist/futurist fantasies,
but also to Donna Haraway’s dream of a de-gendered world of
eternally respassed boundaries. The paper reflects my
evolving interest in both modernism and feminism, and evidences my
continued search for fruitful and provocative ways in which they
can make valuable interventions in each other .
(Note: Although I don’t discuss his work in the papers I chose
for this portfolio, I’ve found the poetry of Wallace Stevens to be
a potentially rich point where feminism and modernism can
intersect, and I wanted to briefly illuminate another example of an
interesting link between a male modernist and a feminist.
Adrienne Rich famously declared that, “Re-vision—the act of looking
back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new
critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural
history; it is an act of survival.” This feminist conception
of “survival” gained through the re-vision of stories complements
as it complicates Stevens’s claim that it is through
“fictions” that we are able to sustain ourselves in a world that is
“not our own.” I’m interested in further articulating what I
see as a very promising space in Stevens’s work for the
construction of sustainable, feminist fictions in which binaries
and hierarchies are subverted, a space of powerful tension where
order and ambiguity can co-exist.)
In Why Different?, Luce Irigaray asserts that “women
don’t have the same relationship as men do to the other and to the
world and they don’t translate it into discourse the same
way” (43). Although I’m aware that some theorists have read
Irigaray as problematically essentialist, I see her articulation of
gendered experience as both real and necessary. Obviously,
critically navigating between the extremes of essentialism and
constructivism is pivotal to anyone invested in the project(s) of
feminism, and my own navigation has hopefully developed throughout
the papers I’ve submitted. Although “She Has Had Her
Vision” and “Sublimes of Unity and Difference” each enact a
vision of transcending the binary of gender, I try to avoid
over-simplifying the very real differences between male and female
economies and experiences or uncritically positing as “female” any
qualities I’m attracted to. (My paper on the sublime
definitely does a better job of avoiding the occasional lapse into
sentimentalism that I sometimes experience when writing about
Virginia Woolf.) “A World of Iron and Coal” stresses
the metaphorical function of terms like “masculine” and “feminine,”
rejecting the uncritical essentialism of Lawrence and Marinetti,
but is also conscious of the very real politics of gender that I
feel Donna Haraway’s rhetoric tries, at times, to elide.
Maintaining a balance between the need to find fruitful ways to
talk about and communicate across gendered difference, and the need
to avoid simple essentialism is something I struggle to accomplish
in my thinking and in my work.
Because my primary interest is in modernist literature, I’m
especially concerned with the way that this struggle maps itself
out in the study of modernist texts and “modernism” as a
movement. In The Gender of Modernism, Bonnie Kime
Scott asserts the now obvious when she claims that “modernism as we
were taught it at midcentury was perhaps halfway to truth. It
was unconsciously gendered masculine” (2). Over the past few
years, I’ve come across at least three important feminist
approaches to re-visioning the traditionally masculine project of
modernism in various texts on literature of the movement. The
first is the celebration of non-linear l’écriture féminine
(which can, theoretically, be authored by a male as well as a
female --although I’m not sure I’ll ever be convinced that Joyce’s
“Penelope” fits this category.) on which my paper on Woolf is
founded. In “Extreme Fidelity,” Cixous explains that, “What I
call ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ is the relationship to pleasure”
(132). Within these parameters, writing itself can be called
“female” if it’s playful, open-ended, non-logo-centric.
Initially, I was extremely attracted to discourse about “female”
writing, and although I’ve increasingly become more interested in
more explicitly political modes of feminism, I continue to feel
that studying and celebrating non-phallocentric writing that
eschews domination is pivotal.
A second feminist approach to studying modernism involves
expanding or revising the “canon” of modernism in an attempt to
re-value the (until recently) largely ignored works of female
modernists such as Mina Loy, H.D., and Marianne Moore.
Canon revision is obviously a significant feminist project for any
period, and I’ve come to believe that delving into the texts of
writers like Loy and Stein in conjunction with more canonical
“high” modernist works like The Waste Land is not only a
pleasurable, but a necessary, act.
A third approach, which I employ in my paper on Marinetti and
Lawrence, is to re-examine modernist texts in a critical attempt to
discover how gender is constructed within them, and challenge male
assumptions about masculinity/femininity. This has become my
central concern, and has propelled my interest in the way gender is
constructed both in modernism and in the sublime. I
automatically find myself intensely interested in the gender stakes
of whatever text I’m reading and working with, and this investment
has come to increasingly dominate my work; many of my more recent
papers have grappled with issues of textual gender
construction. I’ve found each approach to be fruitful,
however, and remain committed both to celebrating female,
avant-garde prose and poetry (like that of Woolf and Loy) and
challenging masculinist modernist biases (like those of Pound and
Eliot).
As a reader, I’ve grown more comfortable with challenging the
implicitly masculine assumptions on which much of the literature
I’ve studied is constructed, and I’ve become more aware of the
necessity of reading “against” certain texts. As a writer
I’ve become more confident in my assertions, and less dependent on,
say, Harold Bloom’s. My papers evidence my attempt to balance
the dependence on secondary critical sources I sometimes tended
towards as an undergraduate with more “pure” theory and primary
texts; I think that even contrasting the paper from my first
semester as a graduate student with the papers from later semesters
demonstrates my progression in this area.
Critically, I’ve read and used the work of a number of feminist
theorists. As evidenced by the papers I’ve submitted for this
portfolio, I’ve obviously gotten a lot of mileage out of French
feminism, but I’ve also engaged with the work of feminist theorists
like Susan Bordo, Elaine Showalter, and N. Katherine Hayles, as
well as gender theorists like Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler.
I’m additionally interested in the Habermasian emancipatory
feminist projects discussed by critics Alison Assiter, Pauline
Johnson, and Barbara Marshall. (Long Note: I’ve become increasingly
convinced that the rejection of an all-inclusive, patriarchal
meta-narrative in no way precludes the acceptance of a materially
grounded narrative that can be used to enact positive social
change. I would argue that, in a climate of exponentially
increasing stories, any emancipatory feminist project necessitates
a sustainable and coherent vision. An understanding of
“humanity” as evolving, an “unfinished project,” is crucial to my
understanding of the project of contemporary “humanist” feminism.)
I try to engage with a diverse variety of theorists and artists in
my critical pieces (which, admittedly, may not be as apparent in
the rather Cixous-heavy papers I’ve submitted here than it is in
some of my other work.) At times while doing research,
however, I’ve become frustrated with the masculine biases in so
much theory itself. As a result, if some of my feminist
investments seem a bit demodé, they probably are; although I still
actively attempt to engage with some more “postmodern” theories and
theorists, postmodern calls for endless difference and the
dispersal of the subject conflict with what I see as a critical
need to re-assign value to the gendered subject and construct
shared, coherent goals for communities that have traditionally been
marginalized.
Ultimately, the questions I have about not only texts
themselves, but also the politics of English studies and canon
formation, have been significantly shaped by my investment in
feminist theory, which I see not merely as a lens through which to
view and talk about literature, but as an ethical commitment that
forms an integral part of one’s politics, of the way one interacts
with others and experiences the world. I hope this portfolio
succeeds in communicating a thoughtful engagement with both
feminist principles and the gender politics of literary
texts. Underlying each paper is a concern with finding
ethical ways to talk about difference, and an investment in
challenging a system of binary thinking that systematically
privileges the male. Although I obviously still struggle with
the complex relationships between gender and language, and theory
and politics, I feel that these papers evidence my evolving sense
of the fruitful relationship(s) between feminism and
literature.