Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde - Couverture souple

Suleiman, Susan R.

 
9780674853843: Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde

Synopsis

In this book Suleiman shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists in the 20th century and in the process offers interpretations of major French avant-garde writers.

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Biographie de l'auteur

Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature. Suleiman is the author or editor of many books and articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996). She has edited several influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (with Christie McDonald, 2010), .Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (1998), and The Female Body in Western Culture (1986). Suleiman has won many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement and a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Radcliffe Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She has been invited to lecture at major universities in England, France, Spain, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Israel, Canada, China, and Taiwan, as well as every region of the United States. She has served as an elected member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, and as Vice-President and President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In her spare time, Suleiman enjoys swimming and tennis, movies, theater, and opera. The mother of two sons and grandmother of three grandchildren, she lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Présentation de l'éditeur

In this important book, noted Harvard scholar Susan Suleiman explores the politics as well as the aesthetics of modern and postmodern writing and art, from Dada and Surrealism to the present. Through her detailed readings of works by avant-garde writers and artists like André Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male artistic imagination and the extent to which masculinist assumptions have shaped modern art and theory. She asks: What place do women artists and writers have in the avant-garde? Suleiman discusses works by Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman and others, showing how feminist avant-garde art provides a powerful, often humorous or parodic critique of patriarchal ideologies. Central to Suleiman’s revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman’s laughing mother embodies one possible link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.

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