Zarathustra's Sisters

by Ingram, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780802036902
• ISBN10: 0802036902
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

Although the names Mandel'shtam and Nijinsky more commonly evoke the Russian poet and the ballet dancer, their wives, Nadezhda and Romola are also beginning to attract attention. Similarly, the lives and works of Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salome, Asja Lacis, and Maitreyi Devi all have been represented as having been dominated by their association with some of the most important men of Western letters, but they too are coming into their own. These six women all wrote the stories of their own lives, creating powerful narratives that channelled cultural forces at the same time as parrying them. Susan Ingram analyzes the literary, cultural, and ethical effects of these writers whose lives were intertwined with the cultural vibrations of their time, and who heralded the postmodern in having to negotiate their subject positions in the form of a relational autonomy, an ethical sense of alterity, and a strong desire to make an intervention in the cultures of their times. Interdisciplinary in approach, this study brings together scholarship on auto/biography, post/modernity, ethics, identity, and relationality, and makes available material from a variety of languages, some of which appears in English for the first time. In relating the life-stories of six remarkable women to the increasingly popular genre of academic personal criticism, Ingram concludes that the ambiguous, problematic way these women represent their autonomy encourages us to read such academic criticism with attention to the way it represents and often blurs personal and collective identity.

Author Biography

Susan Ingram is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Zarathustra's Sisters	3	(20)
Prototypically Zarathustrian: A Prologue	23	(8)
PART 1: WRITING OVER	31	(30)
Lou Andreas-Salome	33	(13)
Simone de Beauvoir	46	(15)
PART 2: WRITING BACK	61	(30)
Maitreyi Devi	65	(12)
Asja Lacis	77	(14)
PART 3: WRITING UP	91	(36)
Nadezhda Mandel'shtam	95	(15)
Romola Nijinsky	110	(17)
Conclusion: Autobiographical Writing and the Postmodern	127	(16)
Notes	143	(26)
Bibliography	169	(22)
Index	191