Chabon mentions Pynchon

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great discussion of the issues, Bekah.  I'd also toss Willa Cather, Edith Wharton (has she been mentioned? Can't remember), Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch into the mix.  But it's absolutely true that most, if not all, of the greatest authors of the past have been white men, and pretending otherwise is pointless.  The controversy of this basic fact is the line of reasoning:  women/non-whites didn't have the ability, or they were prevented from taking their rightful place.  I assume most of us would veer towards the latter, but there's also the issue that women, say, who grew up in a sexist environment (i.e. all women) don't even bother to explore whether they might have the ability to write something great, as they're aware (correctly) that it will be taken less seriously than what their male counterparts write.  The tendency towards affirmative action in the literary prize world doesn't necessarily correct this, because sexism is alive and well all around us.  For example, not a single woman director was included in the feature competition of the Cannes film festival this year.  Why? 

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
>Sent: Oct 28, 2012 1:22 PM
>To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Chabon mentions Pynchon
>
>Preface -  I got really ramble here -  sorry - 
>
>**
>I see your point exactly, Alice,  - I was trying to avoid that interpretation the first time - heh.    What you address  (see below)  is something women's studies programs and some history people have grappled with for years - a couple or more decades now?     No matter how much you dig,  you're not going to come up with really important female Napoleons,  explorers,  inventors,  artists, etc.    It's not going to happen because they weren't there - we can't invent them for the sake of equal representation.   The same is true of literature -  we have what we have.  (We actually do have George Eliot,  Jane Austen,  the Brontes,  Woolf,  and others -  mostly English.  But otherwise it's  like crying where are the GREAT 19th century Russian (or French) women novelists?  Answer  - there weren't any!)   
>
>A few years ago  Elaine Showalter,  and before her Carolyn Heilbrun,  tried to come up with alternative methods for studying women's history and evaluating women's literature.  It's not gone far,  but some things have become more acceptable such as a more holistic and social approach for biographies of folks who didn't leave a written trail - mostly women and minorities  (and see Inga Clendinnen for historiography).  
>
>I think the current syllabi are working with what they have and will continue to do so (like what's the alternative?)    But is there perhaps a bit more attention given these days to George Eliot than to Thomas Hardy? To Kate Chopin than to Upton Sinclair?   I think Dickens need not worry  - nor Dostoevsky and Balzac.   Maybe George Gissing could stand to be nervous or Kipling.  as we rediscover … um … ? Gaskell?  (heh) I can't even think of any woman who would edge Eliot or Pound out - more likely they will be outed by time >>> 
>
>Another issue in both literature and history is that more and more is being produced every day by men and women actors (on the stage of history) and authors.   In order to have time to read (or teach) a sampling of much at all you have to skip a lot.  Either that or have little tiny courses on little tiny genres and eras and movements,  etc.  How to cover English lit in a 101 class?   Gads - Beowulf to Zadie Smith?  When I was in school it was to Orwell and Eliot who were writing about 10 years prior to my birth.  If we were to cover English lit to 1983 or so  (10 years prior to the birth of today's college student) it would have to include the poetry of Ted Hughes  and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie  -  you have one 3-unit course  (and all else is for majors or US lit, a possibly different class). 
>
>This doesn't change the fact that today women are out there producing fine literature  - (this was my original point).  These women are A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel,  Nadine Gordimer,  Margaret Atwood,  etc.  I have no idea what contemporary works professors would choose to work with - there are plenty of male and female authors and much of it comes down to preference.  I don't feel like evening up the past with an overload of women in the 21st century. 
>
>I wonder if the English women don't' have something US women are lacking - I doubt it - I think it's the majority of readers here and the publishers backing the bucks. 
>
>All that said,  I very much admired the books The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson,  2010) and The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach,  2011).  Both authors are white males.  I think Harbach should have got the Pulitzer (but the whole thing was a farce trying to force a win for Wallace - just my o).   
>
>Out of the 9 novels listed as the best of 2011 (Editor's Picks)  on Amazon - 7 are by men  3 US white and 1 US Puerto Rican,   1 Japanese,  2 English.  
>Of the 2 women on the list,  one is from Eastern Europe,   1 is US white but very young.   
>
>Man Booker 2012 long list has 7 men and 5 women -  10 from Britain,  3 from other parts of the UK. 
>
>**
>somewhat related - 
>From http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/hutcheon.html
>Theorizing Feminism and Postmodernity: A Conversation with Linda Hutcheon
>
>Why have so many feminist artists and theorists resisted the lure of postmodernism?
>
> In part, it has been because the early constructions of the postmodern were resolutely male (and that's one of the reasons I chose to write on the subject): male writers, artists and theorists were for a long time in the foreground.  Sometimes this was a real blind-spot; sometimes it was what we might call a form of gender-caution: people were afraid, because of that resistance of feminists,  to label women writers or theorists as postmodern.  This was, in part, because, women were indeed resisting such labeling, sometimes out of a worry that the political agenda of their feminisms would be subsumed under the "apolitical" aestheticizing label of postmodernism.   But it depends on whose definition of the postmodern we are talking about.   I happen to think that postmodernism is political, but not in a way that is of much use, in the long run, to feminisms:   it does challenge dominant discourses (usually through self-consciousness and parody),   but it also re-instates those very discourses in the act of challenging them.   To put it another way,  postmodernism does deconstruct,  but doesn't really reconstruct.  No feminist is happy with that kind of potential quietism,  even if she (or he) approves of the deconstructing impulse:  you simply can't stop there.  This important issue of agency has become central not only to feminism, of course, but to "queer theory" and to postcolonial theory. 
>
>****
>Bekah
>
>
>On Oct 28, 2012, at 7:33 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Exactly what I meant with my slightly ambiguous post; that is, the
>> trend away from giving such awards to living white males is guided by
>> the attempt to address or correct the practice of maintaing a
>> curriculum in which dead white males still dominate the cannon (the
>> works deemed to be either classics or worthy of study), and this
>> domination is driven by LWM domination of academic positions in the
>> humanities departments where literature is studied, where syllabi are
>> written.  In other words, while I agree that the "test of time"
>> consideration is a factor, it is politics, and I would characterize it
>> as conservtive, for it seeks to advance a tradtion at the expense of
>> what is novel and what is different, in other words, what is other
>> than DWM.
>> 
>> A student of philosophy is not going to find too many black authors or
>> females on a syllabus. Why is that? She may find Chinese or Japanese.
>> She may find Jewish philosophers, an entire course. But black
>> philosphers? Not likely. But philsophy is not literature, or physics
>> or mathematics. As women have dominated literature for some time now,
>> in writing and reading, and, as women continue to teach more, study
>> more, generally, and dispropotianately in English and Literature
>> studies,  this from the Pre-K level to the graduate school level, a
>> change seems inevitable. Will students, one day, be taught that that
>> Elizabeth Bishop is greater than Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and the rest? Or
>> will War & Peace, the turnings and turnings in the widening gyre, the
>> wasteland, simply remain the landscape of males, no country for mad
>> woemn in the attic?
>> 
>>> Likely because the "test of time" figures into the books on a typical syllabus.   I don't believe many "dead white males"  are eligible for the NBCA awards - I think they're for books written in the year of the award.
>>> 
>>> Now I'm guessing at the bit about the syllabus  -  I had exactly one lit class in college - required.
>