num_pages: 312
description: I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. - from HeroinesOn the last day of December 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron Ohio where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist wives and mistresses. In her blog entries Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot Jane Bowles Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced erased and institutionalized. Over the course of two years Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's toxic girls could devise a new feminist discourse writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.In Heroines Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional girl-on-girl crime of the Second Wave of feminism - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the minor and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. ANXIETY: When she experiences it it's pathological writes Zambreno. When he does it's existential. By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.
language: English
title: Heroines
publisher: Semiotext(e)