返回Google圖書搜尋

Poetics of the Other

其他書名	Five Feminist Writers from English Canada and Québec
出版	University of Toronto, 1999
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=pVCfSgAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This volume considers the work of five feminist writers from Québec and English Canada: Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Di Brandt, Erin Mouré and Lola Lemire Tostevin. Poetry is the predominant genre in this study, although these writers' transgression of generic boundaries involves a blending of poetry with prose and of the creative with the theoretical. In keeping with a feminist critical tradition in Canada and Québec, I refer to these writings as "Ecritures au féminin," or writings in the feminine. This study not only investigates their attempts to inscribe female alterity ("the feminine") within language and subjectivity, but of even greater significance are these writings' contributions to the notion of a feminist ethics. The perspective adopted in this study is a literary, philosophical and feminist one, situated at the confluence of contemporary ethical theory and feminist literary criticism. The shared ground of the five writers lies in their self-conscious explorations of a distinctly feminist poetics centred on theories of sexual difference and oriented around the maternal. These writings expand and also complicate the notion of an ethics of alterity as it pertains to issues of gender, language and writing, of subjectivity, and of relational exchange. The feminist ethics outlined here is derived from Emmanuel Uvinas' challenge to metaphysical ontology, Paul Ricoeur's own relational theory, and Luce Irigaray's application of ethical theory to sexual difference. These theorists premise their versions of ethics on the interrelated notion of same and other, applied by Irigaray and other feminist theorists to the mother-child dyad. The writers in question offer various configurations of the maternal dyad to reveal one possible model of a relational ethics. This maternal model underlies constructions of female subjectivity along with other modes of social and sexual interaction represented in these writings. However, representations of female intersubjectivity also contain the possibility of ethical breakdown, as well as the necessity of constant renegotiation. The difficulties and contradictions encountered in these literary formulations of self and other are the crux of a feminist ethics which demands the careful, yet not always sustainable, balance between identification and differentiation, or sameness and otherness.