Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

the novelists i think we're talking about are all i think similarly interested in questions of authorial voice and legitimacy, and they adopt different tactics and ironize them

You know how annoying it is when white people try to ironize racism? No, but seriously...When someone who is, for the purposes of this convo, white, male, and has academic or intellectual privilege and access to publishing and critical acceptance, and they use it to write about neurotic, underachieving young white men who are over-impressed w their own potential and the whole book is about their inner experience and pain, even when the auth is purposefully skewering some part of that on some level, and then A WHOLE SCHOOL OF WRITING COMES OUT OF IT where for a while all the "smart" books that serious ppl read and talk about are the same, it becomes indistinguishable from mirroring reality. At some point it's just the woodwork, it's the water we're all swimming in.

I would even argue that the amt of skewering that the author is really able to do is debatable, centered as they are within the exact thing they're trying to dissect.

Also, writers are in competition w each other, or at least in a dialogue w each other, or with "culture," and trying to achieve ever-increasing subtleties in their ironization, putting finer and finer points on their jokes or observations...until being "ironic" itself is the proof of skill? Seriously, I know we love that shit around here but when done without heart this is the ultimate in tedium.

Or, sorry, that was hyperbolic...even when there is "heart" or...if that level of earnestness is too much, even when there is "understanding" that's supposed to represent shared emotion...it's just sailing too close to the wind for me, I guess. I lose interest a long time before the joke turns on its final point.

A complicated subject because only in the last ten years have I reckoned with what my neutrality meant. For many years I read fiction and poetry with the expectation that I would never experience a connection with the material. I'd empathize with characters and scenarios and study the prose rhythms and mimic them in my own work but that's it. When I told a friend I was reading George Eliot and h/she would say "Ugh, no, I can't relate," I'd recoil. I'd think "What does that have to do with anything? Can't you use your imagination and enter this complicated mid 19th century rural world?"

When I accepted my sexuality I realized these responses were in part stunted. For some novels and poems my neutrality stemmed from my inability to point at a heterosexual romance and "relate" to it. To some extent I still do it and as some of you know I'm still loath to consider intentions as a valid way to judge work but I'm aware. For a gay Hispanic man in his thirties the act of reading demands a constant negotiation among contrary impulses, animal curiosity about the way literature is assembled, and awareness of privilege. I still got a lot to learn.

That's a great post!

thanks!

cosine

About halfway through The V(erificationist -Ed). and I'm trying to give it a fair shake but I'm increasingly irritated by the whole incestuous circle of academics attacking each other and/or each other's work and sleeping with each other/'s wives and over-sensitive middle-aged men having crises of wondering where it all went wrong with their marriages and looking for consolation from rosy-cheeked young women or just women who represent something without being PEOPLE and ARRGH. This is overcoming any appeal the writing or ideas might have had, although in the beginning I was still amused enough to keep going. Am I just inordinately bothered or is there a rawther large body of work that uses this setting/premise and WHY?!?

I remember now that the same issue that nagged me about White Noise although a) it was warmer and less, erm, self-consumed? and b) Ben assures me that it was ground-breaking, basically the first of its kind and should get a bye for originality plus the writing is genius. He may be right but I think I'll pass on anything further in this vein.

― Laurel, Tuesday, October 4, 2005 10:27 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

loooooooooool

Evidence that I really only have about three posts that I write, in different ways, over and over.

You know how annoying it is when white people try to ironize racism? No, but seriously...When someone who is, for the purposes of this convo, white, male, and has academic or intellectual privilege and access to publishing and critical acceptance, and they use it to write about neurotic, underachieving young white men who are over-impressed w their own potential and the whole book is about their inner experience and pain, even when the auth is purposefully skewering some part of that on some level, and then A WHOLE SCHOOL OF WRITING COMES OUT OF IT where for a while all the "smart" books that serious ppl read and talk about are the same, it becomes indistinguishable from mirroring reality. At some point it's just the woodwork, it's the water we're all swimming in.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Thursday, December 5, 2013 10:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think we're talking about totally different authors?

i'm not gonna go to bat for the baker who i haven't read, and i mean white noise has lots of limitations as a campus novel (even if a clever one) but you could apply 90% of those limitations and then some to like jane smiley--so i think its less race/gender and just that the subject matter takes _lots_ of work to make interesting because its been, as you note, so thoroguhly mined. but then you look at an ur-campus/young man novel like 'lucky jim' and its wickedly funny satire despite reflecting a v. sexist society. or maybe dubus who even when doing that sort of stuff (though he tackles middle-aged ppl) in like "we don't live here anymore" is really delicate and heartbreaking.

so its not like a celebration and then a skewering but at least in some cases a very sharp painful self-awareness (of ppl who you don't care about is the problem?).

like, it depends, and at a level of generality where we're not naming names and not talking about particular books and authors i don't know what to say.

i do want to rep for some updike and mailer for sure. The Executioner's Song is a stunning book. Just freaking magnificent. Among his faults, mailer was _not_ a one trick pony (tho you might think it from his early career).

lol I actually did enjoy Lucky Jim and the Rachel Papers but got nowhere with subsequent works by Amis the Younger. I read a couple of them and was like, this world is terrible, I don't want to mentally live there anymore much like I don't hang out w people I loathe irl.

rachel papers is fabulous

but i haven't read any others

It and Experience are his best books.

like, it depends, and at a level of generality where we're not naming names and not talking about particular books and authors i don't know what to say.

Women should name names so that you can go down the list and disprove them one by one? Uh no thanks, I'll pass. Roth and Updike take the blows in this excerpt but the real book release is next week and I'm very interested in the whole thing.

no not so i can disprove!

i suspect i might agree on e.g. baker.

i just think we're talking past eachother because you're thinking about certain writers and i'm thinking about others. and at this level of generality i think we're gonna disagree _more_ for that reason. the later updike i've looked at, apart from the bechs, has been pretty dull. but rabbit run really did something for me, etc.

if you want to have at richard ford's midlife crisis emoporn then i'm totally going to agree.

its just "white men write like _this_" doesn't seem a very useful, or even feasible proposition.

i avoided some of this stuff for years because i was convinced it would be dreary, and then i was surprised by how much was going on with it, and how much why it worked has not been part of almost _any_ critical discussion i'd encountered w/r/t it.

not that I've read many, if any of the authors being floated here (lol hardcore anti-"literature" stance since 1991) but s.clover, surely part of what you're seeing re: people not taking into account what you're seeing in some of these works is a necessary function of a difference in perspective between the semi-strawman of "white dudes talking about themselves" and what you would bring to your reading? just throwing that out there, no idea if it makes sense or not because like I said, I actively avoid the authors you all are currently discussing

I never read any Ford, actually! For me personally, this list is Salinger, DeLillo, M Amis, Updike, Roth, Atrim (ugh), Franzen, Chabon even though there are bits of Mysteries that I love. That's about all I tried to tackle, here and there, before I gave up and went back to genre fic by women. Academia can keep them.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh, one of the novels whose fascination with sexual fluidity made a considerable impact on me, is boneheaded about women.

i think it's unfair to characterize philip roth as writing about being a white man

still... i dunno, lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical, like you can self-identify with the general truth of a book and not necessarily specific characters or who they are.

Funny you should say that because one of the big proponents of the no-self-identification angle was Nabokov

Who preferred his books to be puzzles

And once published a book of chess problems paired with poems

― 乒乓, Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:20 AM (Yesterday)

nabokov definitely liked to toy with/upturn a lot of literary conventions, but i don't know if he was necessarily against self-identification. can you point me to an essay that argues this?

I'm not at all sure that all these writers were always thinking, I'm going to write about being a white man! I think to some extent they were just, or thought they were just, writing about being. But the same kinds of "truths" keep getting revealed and other people's truths are erased, over and over.

though the dude was opinionated, i'm sure he's said something himself xp

i'm just not convinced that the truths roth was revealing were the truths of being a white man bc i'm not sure what it means to say he's a white man. he was writing about what it means to aspire to whiteness (esp in American Pastoral) or to be firmly outside whiteness. He wasn't writing about whiteness the same way Updike was - who basically breathed the whiteness.

like i guess on some level you could reduce Human Stain to a book about being white, but it's also a book about not being white too - ditto Plot Against America, Communist, Shylock, Portnoy, etc

The Human Stain also concerns what whiteness means and its modes of behavior.

I myself heard it second hand from a professor but I believe that it came from the lectures he did at Cornell xo to k3v

Whoops -- too late

I honestly can't answer this bc my exposure to Roth is v superficial, but wasn't he writing a great deal about what it meant to be a man?

Doing a search for Nabokov and identification brings up a lot of snippets

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/21/nabokov-on-what-makes-a-good-reader/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/a-from-nabokov/

He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

I never read any Ford, actually! For me personally, this list is Salinger, DeLillo, M Amis, Updike, Roth, Atrim (ugh), Franzen, Chabon even though there are bits of Mysteries that I love. That's about all I tried to tackle, here and there, before I gave up and went back to genre fic by women. Academia can keep them.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Thursday, December 5, 2013 1:40 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see outside of roth i think yr pretty spot on here (unless you just mean super-early roth -- the article linked really made that a big distinction too)! i guess salinger is the prototype for this sort of stuff, and the one i've sometimes felt guilty i never really 'got'? & some early delillo i liked but i dunno if i'd still like it going back to it -- by the time he got into underworld mode i found him basically unreadable.

and i do think the rabbits fit yr description but at least in rabbit, run there's something fresh and astonishing in the prose that makes it work anyway.

djp -- i'm not arguing i identify w/ these authors, i don't. but i identify with the article, in that there was something about reading e.g. rabbit run, and feeling like it was a very precise description of aliens from another planet, and that this was something i appreciated.

see this is what I get for half-reading a thread that has veered into shit I've actively avoided but am semi fascinated by

in orbit -- yeah roth's early stuff is about young men, but its also very much about identity, and in the later stuff he really moved to a much broader span of concerns and ideas.

when young ppl write novels they aren't usually equipped to write about much more than their immediate experience, or at least they need to get that out of their system, if they can, before they can go new places. & i agree the cavalcade of identikit writers workshop bildungsromans can be wearying, and absolutely that its a v. male genre. but at least some authors can go to much more interesting places when they grow out of that, and ad least some things in that vein can be really good, at least when taken individually.

the thing with the earlier generation too is maybe they're better with time.

like if i was reading rabbit right after its publication (or cheever contemporaneously, etc), it maybe would have been a world i was more exposed to, even if vicariously, and so it wouldn't have been as interesting to me. but now its like a time machine.

I'm sort of past it now, or it's just not that relevant to my life anymore bc my engagement is mostly with like feminist and Black/intersectional feminist theory as it relates to social justice work, these days. But for a while, maybe around 6-8 years of my life and maybe bc it was That Moment and I worked in a bookstore with "serious" ppl, these were the novels you had to have read in order to talk about...anything. Or have influence. And years later, even when that moment was over, you still had to have an appreciation/critique of the same authors and their works in order to function at a high level in conversations with references, tossed off asides, joeks, etc--to just understand the feel of things.

I, like Dan, avoided the whole bolus but kind of floated around the edge where I could afford to roll my eyes but still had the option of trying to peer through the peephole via my friendships w ppl who were "in." But I always felt like my choice had been an anti-intellectual one or something...anyway, I want to read more about how this grouping of choices I made wasn't just me, I want to locate it in something more complex.

Basically it's good to see my experience reflected, even if it's 15 years later.

i love delillo but fuck the rest of them

Avoided all american authors

IYO who are the best Irish female authors

Maeve Binchy iirc

McCarthy

Many, many x-posts but isn't it possible to identify with a character in a novel, whilst also noticing yourself doing that, and noticing whatever biases it may be giving you as a reader? Although I think someone else upthread said it wasn't an either/or thing, identification, anyway.

Interesting to note how strongly some of us fall to either end of the pro/anti identification spectrum as readers

<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin";>"It’s funny, The Anxiety of Influence came out at just the time that women were discovering other women writers and saying, Hey, we have influences! We never did before! Here were all the men worrying about the anxiety of being influenced and the women were going, Whoopee!"</a>

the anxiety of bbcode

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/12/9/lena-chen-onlineharassment.html

good god, that's the most sickening thing i've read in quite a while

ugh
Is there any possibility of this sort of thing becoming "easily" fixable by Google or w/ever?

ugh i had to stop reading it
how scary