The erotics of talk
Subtitle: women's writing and feminist paradigms
By: by Carla Kaplan.
Publisher: Oxford University Press; Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
Subjects: Jacobs, Harriet A. 1813-1897; Hurston, Zora Neale; Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855; Walker, Alice, 1944- ; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; Feminism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Women and literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Literary form
Description: In this provocative rereading of the classic texts of the feminist literary canon, Carla Kaplan takes a hard look at the legacy of feminist criticism and argues that important features of feminism's own canon have been overlooked in the rush to rescue and identify.

African-American women's texts, she demonstrates, often dramatize their distrust of their readers, their lack of faith in "the cultural conversation," through strategies of self-silencing and "self-talk." At the same time, she argues, the homoerotics of women's writing has too often gone unremarked. Not only does longing for an ideal listener draw women's texts into a romance with the reader, but there is an erotic excess which is part of feminist critical recuperation, itself.

. Drawing on a wide range of resources, from sociolinguistics and anthropology to literary theory, Kaplan's highly readable study proposes a new model for understanding and representing "talk."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-225) and index.