Rooms of Our Own

by Gubar, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780252073793
• ISBN10: 0252073797
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-30
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classicA Room of One's Ownas her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor. A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several decades: the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. YetRooms of Our Owneschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.

Author Biography

Susan Gubar, a Distinguished Professor of English, has taught at Indiana University for more than thirty years. Along with Sandra M. Gilbert, she wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination (Yale, 1979), a runner-up for both The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Six years later, in 1985, the collaborators received a Ms. Woman of the Year award for their compilation of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, a work that appeared in a revised second edition in 1996. Gilbert and Gubar also followed up The Madwoman with a critical trilogy entitled No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: The War of the Words (1988), Sexchanges (1989), and Letters from the Front (1994) use feminist criticism to illuminate the achievements of British and American literary women in modern times. Gilbert and Gubar's subsequent jointly-authored enterprises consisted of a collection of poetry for and about mothers, MotherSongs (Norton, 1995) and a satire on the contemporary state of literacy and cultural literacy, Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (Rutgers, 1995).
The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, Susan Gubar went on to publish a book on the centrality of cross-racial masquerade in American fiction, photography, painting, and film: Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford, 1997). She then put together a collection of her essays entitled Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (Columbia, 2000). Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Indiana, 2003), explores the evolution of North American and English verse about the Holocaust. In 2005 Professor Gubar provided an introduction and notes for the first annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own to appear in the United States. In 2006, her Rooms of Our Own was published by the University of Illinois Press. Susan Gubar continues to collaborate with Sandra M. Gilbert on a third edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and a new Norton Reader of Feminist Theory and Criticism, both of which will appear in 2007.

Table of Contents

1. The Once and Future History of Sex and Gender	1	(36)
2. "Theory" Trouble	37	(38)
3. White Like Me	75	(37)
4. Global Poetics	112	(37)
5. Institutionalization and Its Queer Discontents	149	(36)
6. Reproduction in an Age of Mechanical Production	185	(40)
SUGGESTED READINGS	225	(12)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	237