A CR Group for Jewish Women

AUTHOR\u27S NOTE: Though I have tried to give some sense of the variety of people and attitudes in my CR group, I alone must take full responsibility for the opinions and viewpoints expressed here. I do not wish to suggest that everyone in the group responded as I did; nor do I wish to suggest that our group was in any way representative of the two other CR groups for Jewish Women, since I have no knowledge of what transpired in those groups. We began as a group of sixteen, ranging in age from twenty-two to sixty-five, and including one mother-daughter pair. Though we varied tn our sexual orientation (about half the women identified themselves as lesbian, half as heterosexual), our places of birth and upbringing, our religious training (if any), and our economic and social origins, all but one was college-educated, and most were (or had been) affiliated with a college or university in the course of their professional careers. This last may perhaps explain the sense of intimacy that quickly developed; or it may have been due to the fact that a number of women in the group already knew one or two others. In my view, however, what drew us closely together was what was revealed in our first hour: that each, in her own way, acknowledged that she needed to be there

Readers\u27 Speakout

Dear Ms. Howe: Your Women\u27s Studies Newsletter\u27s report on feminism in Germany is interesting (Vol VII, No. 1, Winter 1979), but I have some problems with Ms. Zagarell\u27s report. Although one questions in certain quarters what men have to say, one may not question as readily my devotion to research on feminism in Germany. I have problems especially with the last paragraph\u27s assertions (p. 26). Although some see Emma and Courage as excellent sources of information on the German women\u27s movement, they are not so on German women\u27s lives, or the other points asserted. The journals may indeed be a revolutionary statement, but even at a total circulation rate of 300,000 per month, they would hardly have things to say about, or to, more than a miniscule percentage of the German female population. One should ask some of the other 90 percent of Germany\u27s women how well they feel represented

"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

Tropic Trappings in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Joseph Nicolar's The Life and Traditions of the Red Man

With its roots in ancient rhetoric and medieval liturgy, the term trope now refers to a figure of speech that organizes a set of complex ideas into a kind of linguistic shorthand. A trope is thus a phrase or image that conveys more than its literal meaning. Those of us trained in the Western literary canon have learned to recognize a myriad of repeated tropes that underpin the major stories in that canon. For the purposes of the analysis to follow, two tropes are pertinent: the pastoral and the fortunate fall. The word pastoral comes out of the classical tradition and functions as a trope by conjuring up images of happy peasants peacefully herding their flocks in some bucolic countryside. But pastoral thereby also suggests itself as the antithesis of (or even refuge from) the ills of the crowded and hectic city. It is thus a kind of imaginative shorthand for an inherent tension between the urban and the rural. The second familiar trope comes from Christian sources. Originally, the fortunate fall referred to the idea that the sin of Adam and Eve—their disobedience to God, which resulted in the expulsion from Eden and the entry of death into the world—nonetheless set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the resurrection’s promise of salvation and eternal life. Over the centuries, moreover, the meaning of the trope expanded to connote any circumstance in which good eventually emanates from evil or error. Thus, as scholars trained in literary studies come to understand, literary artifacts—or imaginative texts of any kind—are inevitably structured by one or more of the tropes available within the reservoir of tropes that circulate in any culture. But as students of literature also understand, tropes are not universal

Excerpts from In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery

Annette Kolodny executes a breathtaking leap into creation stories and folklore of native peoples. Kolodny examines both European (notably Viking) and Native American stories about the first contacts between the New World and the Old World, and brings the Native people’s words into the center of historical inquiry

Excerpts from <i>In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery</i>

Annette Kolodny executes a breathtaking leap into creation stories and folklore of native peoples. Kolodny examines both European (notably Viking) and Native American stories about the first contacts between the New World and the Old World, and brings the Native people’s words into the center of historical inquiry

Schooling the Nation's Newspaper of Record: The New York Times and Indian Genocide

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a welcome respite from the politics of academia. Little did I know what lay ahead. The editor’s initial response to my final draft of the article was entirely enthusiastic; he wanted to publish it as soon as possible. But 10 days later, that same editor called to say there was a problem. In one sentence in my article, I had referred to General Andrew Jackson’s attempts to “exterminate” the Creek Nations as “genocidal campaigns.” Because the New York Times did not then recognize any interactions between the U.S. government and Native Peoples as acts of genocide either in intent or outcome, I was told that the term “genocidal” had to be deleted. Composed originally as a talk for the 2017 conference of the Society of Early Americanists, this essay follows my months-long struggle to educate the New York Times about the historical realities of Indian-white relations in the U.S.. I finally threatened to withdraw the essay altogether rather than allow any changes to my original text. The essay appeared without any changes in the Sunday, January 31, 1993 issue of the Book Review. Subsequently, both in the Book Review and in stories about Indian history in other sections, the New York Times has continued to use the terms “genocide” and “genocidal.” In retelling this piece of personal history at the SEA conference, my point was both scholarly and political. In a time when a president makes statements that too often corrupt our language, words matter. We bury the realities of our history if we do not name them accurately

New World Encounters: Where Do We Go from Here?

Early American studies scholar and feminist literary critic, Annette Kolodny, offers three projects that she would take on if she were not now retiring from the profession. These three projects include a feminist analysis of women's interactions on the earliest contact and frontier landscapes; the development of a cross- and inter-disciplinary language for better describing initial interactions between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, a language that acknowledges and radically revises our notions of so-called "prehistoric" contacts; and, finally, an analysis of the belief structures that predispose any societal group to enact encounters with Otherness as either welcome, threatening, or something entirely different

Excerpts from In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery

Annette Kolodny executes a breathtaking leap into creation stories and folklore of native peoples. Kolodny examines both European (notably Viking) and Native American stories about the first contacts between the New World and the Old World, and brings the Native people’s words into the center of historical inquiry