Women Writing Culture
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This collection of six interviews with internationally known scholars explores feminism, rhetoric, writing, and multiculturalism.
Description
Women Writing Culture is a collection of six interviews with internationally prominent scholars about feminism, rhetoric, writing, and multiculturalism. Those interviewed include feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding; cultural critic and philosopher of science Donna Haraway; noted American theorist of women's epistemology Mary Belenky; African-American cultural critic bell hooks; Luce Irigaray, a major exponent of "French Feminism"; and Jean-Francois Lyotard, a philosopher and cultural critic who has helped to define "the postmodern condition. " Together, these interviews afford significant insight into these eminent scholars' perspectives on women, writing, and culture, and explore how women write culture through the various postmodern discourses in which they engage.
Gary A. Olson is Professor of English and teaches in the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida. He is co-editor, with Sidney I. Dobrin, of Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom, also published by SUNY Press. In 1993 the Council of Editors of Learned Journals presented him with the International Award for Distinguished Retiring Editor for his decade of work as editor of the Journal of Advanced Composition. Elizabeth Hirsh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida. She is author of Re-Producing Modernism: Irigaray, Formalism, and the Place of the Woman Writer (forthcoming), as well as various articles on feminist theory and modern literature.
Reviews
"Is that why I and many others engage in the processes of interviews, where the collective logics of control of speech and writing systematically disturb our more single-minded literary and scholarly illusions? Is that what Women Writing Culture--a title made up of three impossible signifiers strung together in a feeding web of layered conversations about writing, literacy, rationality, and knowledge among six strangely assorted comrades and their kindly inquisitors--might engender? If, as bell hooks maintains, language is a critical site of struggle, and literacy projects are freedom projects, then these interviews materialize feminist commitments to practical conversation and worldly, differentiated visions. " -- Donna Haraway, from the Foreword
"Olson and Hirsh do more than interview the theorists that speak through this book. They also demonstrate what it means to be public intellectuals themselves by challenging mythologies that frame academics as 'stars' and by relentlessly interrogating each theorist about those in-between places of writing and pedagogy that are generally ignored by most social critics. The result is a dialogue that is crisp, unapologetic, riveting, and challenging. " -- Henry A. Giroux, from the Afterword