This book is primarily a collection of revised versions of talks/other presentations Nancy gave at various events in the 70s and 80s, along with her reflections on the “occasion-ness” of each piece of writing (since each one was written for a specific context at a specific event) and the nature of personal writing. She talks about “narrative criticism” and what counts as “personal” or “too personal,” and whether this changes based on the gender of the author and/or reader. She spends a lot of time puzzling over what it means to speak “as a ___” (as a feminist, as a woman, as a feminist critic, as a feminist professor, etc.), about her positionality (a word I think she doesn’t like) as a feminist teacher and what that means for how she conducts herself in the classroom.
I forget if it was in another essay I read by her or at a presentation of hers that I saw (maybe a panel?), but I have a vague memory of Nancy talking about her anxieties as a teacher when it comes to talking about illness and teaching a class on illness. I took her graduate seminar on illness, and I knew beforehand, because someone told me, that she is ill herself. But she didn’t talk about her own experiences with illness basically at all in class, even as we read tons of very personal accounts of illness, and even though she does write very personally in some of her work (she had a new memoir come out the year I took the class, for example). The passage I wrote out in the Quotes list below about being unsure how to teach a feminist painting class reminded me a lot of our class. She says there she felt a lot of anxiety about how to present the content and the language with which to talk about it, and her solution was to project the paintings on the wall and talk about them collectively. We did the same thing with panels from the graphic memoirs and photos from the photo memoirs, about illness. And it was great! I remember feeling such appreciation, both on a personal and critical level (what’s the difference?). It was satisfying just to dig in together to get a deeper appreciation for all the layers of the books we read. But with her not speaking personally about material that we knew as students was very personal to her (which is totally her right!), there was a perhaps inevitable effect of distancing. Which I don’t want to say was either bad or good, but it did happen. Which feels particularly odd (distancing) given that she writes so candidly about her illness on her website, which is public. But I can’t say I don’t empathize. I’m very hesitant to explicitly come out to my students verbally, but in my comments to them on their writing, especially if they’ve come out to me in that writing, I think I’m very giving of myself in my own writing back to them. I always try to say to them, disguised as suggestions, “Me too.”
Identifying yourself “as a” ___ is important, but also limiting. “The Epistemology of Ethnography,” which I read last night, talks about this too. Even if you’re organically part of the group you’re studying (one author the article analyzes is a Surimese woman writing about Surimese women, another is a gay person from the rural South writing about gay people in the rural South), your role as a participant-observer always shapes the context you’re trying to participate in and observe. Both roles are compromised by each other. The article also talks about how “as a __” statements have become a genre feature of ethnography, but only in particular sections, bracketing off the positionality of the researcher to only some aspects of the conversation. The research you are able to do, the data you are able to collect, how you interpret and present it, and how it is received, are all affected by how you situate yourself and how you are situated. Data/theory as a binary is both “real” but also constantly undermined by itself. The data you’re able to get is determined by your approach, and what you’re able to theorize from the data is determined by the data you have.
Quotes I Marked
p.xii- “Perhaps what seems most ‘feminist’ to me about the uses of both metaphor and narrative criticism is the self-consciousness these modes of analysis tend to display about their own processes of theorization; a self-consciousness that points to the fictional strategies inherent in all theory.”
p.xiii- quote from Adrienne Rich about stopping saying “the body” (abstract) and always saying “my body”
p.xiii - “one’s own body can constitute an internal limit on discursive irresponsibility, a brake on rhetorical spinning. The autobiographical act— however self-fictional, can like the detail of one’s (aging) body, produce this sense of limit as well: the resistance particularity offers to the grandiosity of abstraction that inhabits what I’ve been calling the crisis of representativity. (Perhaps we also need a moratorium on reciting the litany of RaceClassGender and instead a rush into doing positive things with those words.)” (in the notes, she adds to this that radical language is easy, radical action is hard)
p.xiv- contradictions between autobiography as individualistic and inward, vs. the political (collective) demands of feminism
p.5- “The case for personal writing entails the reclaiming of theory: turning theory back on itself….Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice?…Being embarrassed. And then being angry about feeling embarrassed. When you write in a personal voice ‘in a professional context’ about what is embarrassing, who is embarrassed? The writer or the reader?”
p.8- idea of “critical plausibility,” discussion of how while mentions of the personal, the writer sitting at her desk looking out her window, are pleasurable to many readers, because they make them feel close with the writer as another real human being, including some personal things (like going to the bathroom) might harm our ethos, our critical plausibility.
p.8- block quote from Barthes- “To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work…To go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one’s own language. But by that very process it is to send the work back to the desire to write from which it arose. And so discourse circulates around the book: reading, writing.”
p.9- idea of a “biographized rhetorical personality", “what gives a reader and a critic pleasure in reading other writers and critics? What produces a kinship of desire to write?”
p.10- idea that “Have you read this? I love it! Here’s why!” and other embodied reactions like excitement are considered critically inappropriate. But why?
p.12- Use of “we” (used to create identification between writer and reader) can be either engaging or alienating to a reader. “It feels good, for a little while, until it starts to feel coercive, until ‘we’ are subscribing to things that ‘I’ don’t believe. There is no specific reference to the author’s self, no attempt to specify himself” (this is a quote from another source)
p.14-15- discussion of how feminist academics (that is, white mainstream academic feminists) still write like everybody else with a PhD for publications. But they did more experimental, political, personal writing in “occasional writing” (for conferences, for newsletters, etc.)
p.16- Nancy says the personal and the positional are different.
p.17- rhetorical paradox of writing a personal reply to another person, but with the intention of publication. You’re writing for that person, but also, for an abstract generalized audience
p.19- “What’s personal? Who decides?…Is it personal only if it’s embarrassing? If not, is it just a rhetorical ploy? Do I wind up saying that ‘bad’ politics aren’t personal? Or am I saying, if I like it, it’s personal, it caresses me; otherwise, it’s just positional, it aggresses me.” She says this about how she feels an essay by MacLean, while discussing himself, isn’t really personal, but positional— one instantiation of the position of white man professor. But then she isn’t quite sure where she makes that distinction and whether it is fair.
p.24- quote from Mary Ann Caws- “Personal criticism as I intend it has to do with a willing, knowledgeable, outspoken involvement on the part of the critic with the subject matter, and an invitation extended to the potential reader to participate in this interweaving and construction of the ongoing conversation this criticism can be, even as it remains a text.” “somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk. In this sense, by turning its authorial voice into a spectacle, personal writing theorizes the stakes of its own performance: a personal materialism.”
p.25- “At its worst, the autobiographical act in criticism can seem to belong to a scene of rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves who get to call each other (and themselves) by their first names in print…But at its best, I would argue, the personal in these texts is at odds with the hierarchies of the positional—working more like a relay between positions to create critical fluency. Constituted finally in a social performance, these autobiographical acts may produce a new repertory for an enlivening cultural criticism.” Maybe this is why I’ve reacted so negatively to some of the memoirs I’ve read and positively to some of the others, and I haven’t been able to figure out the distinguishing factor. There’s a difference in vibe between that “referring to each other by first name in print” (an in group— several memoirs I read include the authors mentioning authors of other memoirs I read, they have the privilege of getting published writing about each other, in a semi self-contained group) and people who write about themselves but feel like they’re giving something to the reader— like Lillian Faderman, whose book I finished last night.
p.34- distinction between feminist critique (unpacking gender shit in texts by men) and feminist criticism (writing about texts by women)
p.35- burden of the professional feminist critic is it’s not enough to just say if you like the work and why. You have to justify the choice of that work in the first place but also “for political and intellectual reasons be prepared to say something about the writing qua women’s writing”
p.35-36- Nancy gives a metaphor to illustrate the difference between feminist critique and feminist criticism. Doing feminist critique of a man’s text is like an artichoke, and you peel it layer by layer to reveal “the overdetermined discovery of the core” (you set out to find sexism, you find some sexism). Feminist criticism is more like an “onion”- layers with no clear core/center/purpose (that is pre-determined by the project. you have to find it.)
p.36- cites a term from Honor Moore— “the male approval desire filter (M-A-D).” It’s the pressure to do criticism in the traditional way, to receive approval and professional accolades. Nancy envisions resisting the M-A-D as taking down the divider in her bedroom between her bed/TV area and her desk/work area— letting the personal and the critical come together. But for now, she keeps it up.
p.40-41- story about how when she was preparing to teach a class about 18th century French paintings and fiction, she was faced with “two pedagogic anxieties”: how to present the material and how to articulate the findings. She says the second was the bigger anxiety since she was trying to teach a feminist class to people who might not already be feminist. Her solution was to use the same technique that she used in the Memoir class I took with her— displaying images using a projector, and doing group-criticism of what the images are saying and what we can find there. She calls this “the most persuasive tool I have ever used in teaching” because it brought the bodies under discussion directly into the classroom, and “identified all of us in the room as gendered and sexual beings—whether we wanted to be identified that way or not.”
p.48- note about the uncommon genre of writing about the personal (“real”) reasons you got into a field (like Stacey Waite talks about). Nancy instead decides to write about why she got out of French as a field— and the answer is, the anxiety about making mistakes, particularly about the genders of words, was horrible.
p.125-127- discussion of the false assumption that all women readers will identify with women’s autobiographies along the lines of shared womanhood, a universal Female experience. Nancy says that she later discovered that most of the books she chose for an essay on French women’s autobiography all featured a strong demarcation between the authors’ identities as writers and their relationship with motherhood (as a reality or as a possibility). She wonders how, if her scholarship during that time was really happening out of a need to find a path for herself as a woman without motherhood, what is she looking for now (at the time of the writing of this essay) as she engages with contemporary American texts?
p.128-129- talking about teaching at CUNY instead of at Columbia, being an upper middle class teacher of working class students, and how to deal with class as a teacher and reader. The students in the particular class she’s discussing hated a Room of One’s Own, but loved a different essay about being a Woolf scholar, and loved Jane Eyre.