Recoupling Genre and 'Gender'. Ed. Moira Gatens. Theme Issue for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Proposed publication date: December 2008 .
Questions about genre always raise questions of tradition, authority and exclusion. What justifies the judgement that one text is'philosophical', another 'literary', and yet another 'historical'? And how might these broad 'genre' distinctions play out in the realm ofgender? Is literary production 'feminised' in relation to a 'masculinised' philosophy? And what can be said about the gendering of genres within disciplines? For example:· writing the history of 'Great Men' and 'Great Events' is the preserveof men whereas social histories, that require an 'eye for detail' and the 'everyday', are suited to the special talents of women.· Metaphysics and Epistemology are at the 'science' end of philosophy,whereas moral and social philosophy is at the 'humanities' end and so more suited to women.· Epic poetry, high tragedy, and wide-ranging, 'big picture', creations are the literary preserve of men; women's genre is the novel and the short story, both of which suit women's talents in representing the everyday and domesticity. Perhaps these platitudes do little more than rearticulate the claim that Man is able to grasp the 'universal' whereas woman's preserve is the 'particular'? Recent scholarship, across the disciplines, has questioned both how these disciplines (history, philosophy, and literature) relate to each other and the way in which 'gender' has been coupled with particular genres of writing. This special issue of Angelaki aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars in order to reconsider ways in which the genre and gender question has been configured in recent theory. It seeks innovative reformulations of the genre-gender relation that emphasise the ways in which this relation is intimately tied to specific social norms and particular institutions in a variety of cultural, historical and political contexts. To this end, the papers will explore the specificity of the discursive relationship between various 'coupled' authors as well as the way in which the reception of their writings may have changed over time. (The 'coupled' authors might include: Wollstonecraft and Godwin, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes,Virgina Woolf and Vita Sackville West, Mary Shelley and P. B. Shelley,Heidegger and Arendt, Delueze and Guattari). The overriding aim is to move towards a 'recoupling' of genre and gender that acknowledges the full force of the range of institutions and social and historical conventions at work in genre allocation. The upper limit for submissions is 10,000 words but shorter pieces arewelcome.
Please follow MLA style and submit papers electronically (inWord format) to Moira.Gatens@arts.usyd.edu.au
Deadline for submission: 15 April 2008.
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