Rooms of Our Own
Gubar, Susan
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BOOK SUMMARY
With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her
BOOK SYNOPSIS
With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor.
A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several decades: the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. Yet Rooms of Our Own eschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.
AUTHOR BIO
Susan Gubar, a Distinguished Professor of English, has taught at Indiana University for more than thirty years. Along with Sandra M. Gilbert, she wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination (Yale, 1979), a runner-up for both The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Six years later, in 1985, the collaborators received a Ms. Woman of the Year award for their compilation of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, a work that appeared in a revised second edition in 1996. Gilbert and Gubar also followed up The Madwoman with a critical trilogy entitled No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: The War of the Words (1988), Sexchanges (1989), and Letters from the Front (1994) use feminist criticism to illuminate the achievements of British and American literary women in modern times. Gilbert and Gubar's subsequent jointly-authored enterprises consisted of a collection of poetry for and about mothers, MotherSongs (Norton, 1995) and a satire on the contemporary state of literacy and cultural literacy, Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (Rutgers, 1995).
The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, Susan Gubar went on to publish a book on the centrality of cross-racial masquerade in American fiction, photography, painting, and film: Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford, 1997). She then put together a collection of her essays entitled Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (Columbia, 2000). Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Indiana, 2003), explores the evolution of North American and English verse about the Holocaust. In 2005 Professor Gubar provided an introduction and notes for the first annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own to appear in the United States. In 2006, her Rooms of Our Own was published by the University of Illinois Press. Susan Gubar continues to collaborate with Sandra M. Gilbert on a third edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and a new Norton Reader of Feminist Theory and Criticism, both of which will appear in 2007.
BOOK REVIEWS
This is the latest endeavor by award-winning literary critic Gubar (English, Indiana Univ.), who has numerous works of theory, criticism, and literature to her name, most recently, an annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Gubar's allusions to that book are more than titular. This experimental narrative criticism is an astute feminist revision of Woolf's title that reflects contemporary academic moods and mores. It builds on a year in the life of an on-campus professor and beyond. Gubar's attention to descriptive and explicative detail doesn't falter. Characterizations are meticulous yet humorous and emphatically drive home critical points about changes and advancements in feminism. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and women's studies collections. --Library Journal
"Spoken from the heart, Rooms of Our Own provides a powerful antidote to the pessimism so often expressed about 'feminism' or 'the women's movement' or younger women's seeming lack of interest in battles that still need to be fought. Gubar, one of the foremost pioneers, addresses these issues with elegance and wit, elucidating the multiple currents swirling around gender studies and social activism today and illustrating why they still profoundly matter. Rooms of Our Own speaks as much to the students she so lovingly depicts as to those of us who teach them."
-- Brenda R. Silver, Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor, Dartmouth College
Submit a book reviewFOR RELATED BOOKS
Literary Criticism Books :: Women Authors Books
Social Science Books :: Feminism & Feminist Theory Books
MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0252073797
ISBN(13-digit): 9780252073793
Dewey Decimal: 305.4201
Library of Congress: 2006003048
Book Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 241
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