Abstract
J.M. Hawes accuses me in my reading of Kafka’s Auf der Galerie of committing various critical sins, but he is tilting at windmills. I wholly reject his presumption to have corrected my socialist-feminist approach, which stresses the imaginary without thereby denying the material, by re-centring the pathos of the disempowered, poor man.
Zusammenfassung
J.M. Hawes bezichtigt meine Lektüre von Kafkas Auf der Galerie der verschiedensten kritischen Sünden, kämpft aber dabei gegen Windmühlen. Ich widerspreche seiner Behauptung, er habe meine sozialistisch-feministische Sehweise, die in der Betonung des Imaginären das Materielle keineswegs leugnet, korrigiert, indem er das Pathos des entmachteten armen Mannes wieder ins Zentrum des Blickfelds rückt.
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References
Elizabeth Boa, “Kafka’s Auf der Galerie: a resistent reading”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 65 (1991), 486–501, 500
See Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, Chicago 1980 and Criticism and Social Change, Chicago 1983. Lentricchia argues that the political force of European theory gets lost in deconstruction as practiced in America.
See the Introduction to Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, Cambridge 1987 on marxist-structuralist interchange.
See Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism, London 1977 who appropriate the antiepistemological arguments of the sociologists Paul Hirst and Barry Hindes in their post-marxist materialism.
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-structuralist Theory, Oxford 1987 offers a feminist post-structuralism with a strong marxist element.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, New York 1988 deploys deconstruction and artisan historiographie skills in arguing for gender as a useful category of historical analysis.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spi vak draws connections between Marx and Derrida in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Basingstoke 1988, 271–313; in a dual move Spivak attacks claims to knowledge of “the” subaltern woman’s consciousness yet asserts the continuing if circumscribed tasks of female intellectuals.
For a punchy statement of the value of structuralism and semiotics to materialist feminist criticism, especially Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) written in his structuralist phase, see Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Fourth Impression, London 1983, 11–14.
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, Bloomington 1977, xii.
See Rainer Stach, Kafkas erotischer Mythos. Eine ästhetische Konstruktion des Weiblichen, Frankfurt am Main 1987 with whose judgement I concur: “Aber letztlich entläßt auch Kafka die Frau nicht aus dem Mythos — wenngleich seine Figuren an diesem Joch zu rütteln scheinen” (226).
Robert Walser, Ovation, Das Gesamtwerk, I, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze. Geschichten. Aufsätze, hrsg. Jochen Greven, Geneva 1972, 284–85; originally published in Die Schaubühne, October, 1912.
On the notion of positionality see Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory”, Feminist Theory in Practice and Process, ed. Micheline R. Maison et al, Chicago 1989
see also Leslie A. Adelson, Making Bodies y Making History, Lincoln, Nebraska (1993), 59–67.
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Boa, E. A Young Man Plays the Ringmaster Reply to J.M. Hawes. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 69, 337–343 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374570
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374570