Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PHD Project Plan Dana Contras
PHD Project Plan Dana Contras
Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1
1.2
Hurts ties commodifications maternity and reproduction. Thus she reveals her successful
career through her struggle with her mother, but she also depicts her
ambivalence towards her public life, her ambitions, and its relation to
stereotypes of Jewish feminity. She goes on to paint the portrait of her
overbearing religious Jewish mother and relates this through hyperbole to her
role as a popular author.
Fannie Hurst, Anzia Yezierska, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. In doing so, I have got two
main purposes:
Firstly, to confirm and elaborate the central idea of this part of the thesis: that women
writers have been marginalised within canons of experimental literature.
Secondly, I want to use the work of these writers to suggest that it is not enough to
understand literary experiment as a ruffling of the linguistic surface of a text. Instead, I
tentatively suggest a different conceptual basis for understanding literary experiment,
which proceeds from an understanding of literary strategies as situated social practices.
This feeds back into the first point. It may be that the problem of women being
marginalised within experimental canons cannot be resolved by retroactively assimilating
women into existing canons. For, drawing on work undertaken in my thesis, I will
suggest that the conceptual and ideological frameworks that inform these canons were
established through a set of active exclusions.
will need
During her lifetime, F.Hurst had many an encounter with the idea of
Blackness and Jewishness alike, and, sensing a special connection with
the marginalized, she used her work to unearth and shed light upon
the plight of women trying to surpass their Otherness. That is to say,
they tried to create an identity for themselves and this was only
possible through the written word. Nonetheless, there were many
critics who frowned upon Hurst\Hurston relationship, deeming it as
unequal and racist. However, I plan to prove this wrong, by
demonstrating it was actually flourishing and even innovative and
ahead of its time.
act of imitating the colonizer\ master is imposed by the ruling power upon the margin, but
finally this act takes on a meaning of its own, as it is transformed into a subversive
weapon aimed at hegemony the centre. As a concrete example,one would notice that
language , the means ,the channel of communication is altered ,in most cases adapted in
order to form a new identity seeking for legitimacy and approval. It is from this idea that
a connection with feminism could be made, also having in mind that a woman is
perceived as the other.
Zora Neale Hurston , Black American and Fannie Hurst, Jewish American ,both writers
and lifelong friends ,both hybrids in Bhabhas terms ,both writing back to power, in this
case the American canon ,which was not prepared to usher in new ideas and new
discourses .In both of their discourses one definitely perceives some imitative resistance
Vernacular English but also Yiddish traditions represent a mode of resistance and why not
a mode of surpassing their otherness.
With thorough research, I am sure that Bhabhas key concepts will apply to Fannie Hurst
and Zora Neale Hurston.
Chapter 4. RACE PERFORMATIVITY IN HURST' S NOVELS4.1 JUDITH BUTLER GENDER PERFORMANCES IN IMITATION
OF LIFE
This chapter will entail the subtle race and gender performances in
Fannie Hursts novels and short stories, but also reveal these aspects in
the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, especially in the short story
Sweat
The African-American woman in Imitation of Life is disempowered
through her position as both the servant and the product of a
consumer culture that stigmatises her race. This is represented
through the fate of Delilahs passing daughter which demonstrates that
the African-American womans inclusion in this culture is one in which
she plays a secondary role.
Judith Butlers theories can be linked to the aforementioned.
4.2 HELENE CIXOUS: WRITE YOURSELF ,YOUR BODY MUST BE
HEARD.
Anatomy of Me ,Hursts autobiography displays an array of methapors
and parodies of her commercial status.
4.3 FEMININE WRITING \POST- STRUCTURALIST FEMINIST
THEORIES AND HLNE CIXOUS CRITURE FMININE .
Cixous impels to break their silences and enter the site of speaking, and this is exactly
what Hurst and Hurston did. a voice to working class women and black women.
Chapter 5. CONCLUSIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Bond, Cynthia. "Language, Sign, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God."
Appiah and Gates 204-17
Burstein,Janet: '' Writing Mothers Writing Daughters ,Tracing the Maternal in
Stories by American Jewish women''.(1996)
Denning ,Michael: ''The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in
the Twentieth Century'' (1988)
Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discouse of the Human Sciences."
Hutcheon and Natoli 223-43.
Feldstein,Ruth: ''Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American
Liberalism, 1930-1965'' (2000)
Flitterman-Lewis,Sandy: ''The Black Woman' s Double Determination as
Troubling Other''.(1988).
Foucault, Michel. "Excerpts from Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism." Hutcheon and Natoli 333-341.
Harrison Kahan,Lori: ''White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the BlackJewish Imaginary (The American Literatures Initiative) , (2011)
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Hutcheon, Linda, and Natoli, Joseph, eds. A Postmodern Reader. New York: SUNY,
1993.
Hurst, Fannie: ''Fannie Hurst Papers'' (1910-1965)
Hurston ,Zora Neale : ''Two Women in Particular''. Dust Tracks on a Road : An
Autobiography(1984).
Klein,Marcus: ''The Making of American Literature 1900-1940''. (1981)
Kolodny,Annette: " The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History
in American Life and Letters'',(1984).
Koppelman,Susan: '' The Educations of Fannie Hurst'' (1987)
Koppelman,Susan: ''The Stories of Fannie Hurst"(2004)
Kroeger,Brooke: '' The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst''(1999)
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge." Hutcheon and Natoli 71-90.
Sochen, June: ''Consecrate Every Day: The Public Lives of Jewish American Women, 1880-1980''
.(1981)
Wortmann, Susan: The concepts of Ecriture Feminine in Helene Cixouss The Laugh of the
Medusa.