Description:
"With her vibrant new book, Janet Beizer achieves a subtle blend of aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and epistemological inquiries that mark the best work in humanistic scholarship. Thinking Through the Mothers forges alternative models for feminist biographical writing as a process in which new relational metaphors such as fostering and adoption open fresh insights on the role of mothers and foremothers as precursors. Supported by fruitful considerations of new modes of parenting, Beizer's moving explorations of feminist biographies deserve a large readership in modernist and feminist studies as well as outside academic circles."--Catherine Nesci, author of La Femme mode d'emploi, and most recently Le Flâneur et les flâneuses
"A major work of feminist inquiry. In reimaging feminist biography Janet Beizer has established herself as one of the leading essayists of French letters."--Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College
"We think back though our mothers if we are women, proclaimed Virginia Woolf, but what happens when we go looking for our mothers and find that they are missing in action? So much of the enterprise of writing the biography of our foremothers--what Beizer here dubs 'salvation biography'-consists of filling in blanks, but what happens to the biographical enterprise when we admit that most of the time we are ventriloquizing, speaking our own desires through our foremothers' reconstructed mouths? In Thinking Through the Mothers Janet Beizer finds herself compelled to speak about what must ultimately remain unspoken, while respecting the silences we have inherited. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Beizer uses close reading and juxtaposition to read--and reread--the work of French women writers from George Sand to Louise Colet to Colette (via Flaubert) and to reframe the question 'What do women want?' Reading athwart rather than through the mother, Beizer honors the desire to fill in the blanks of the past while showing how and why we must instead read the blank space itself. Don't you wish all books about biography were this smart? This intellectually and emotionally satisfying? "-Melanie Hawthorne, Texas A&M University
"Janet Beizer's exploration of relationships both real and imagined between mothers and daughters, women and their feminist biographers and critics, is a wide-ranging meditation on the possibilities and difficulties of recuperating past lives, especially those veiled in obscurity, either through the repressions of patriarchy or through a determined stance of secrecy on the part of the subject herself. An excellent close reader, Beizer is adept at dealing with the critical and theoretical underpinnings of her project and in so doing advances theoretical discussion in interesting and imaginative ways."-Rosemary Lloyd, Rudy Professor of French emerita, Indiana University, author of Shimmering in a Transformed Light.
|
