Research Catalog

Title

Troubling maternity : mothering, agency, and ethics in women's writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s / by Emily Jeremiah.

Author

Jeremiah, Emily

Publication

Leeds : Maney Pub. for the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, c2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Modern Humanities Research Association
• University of London. Institute of Germanic Studies

Description

198 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

The question of maternity is crucial for feminists, to whom it represents both challenge and inspiration, as it is for many thinkers engaged with the issues of agency, corporeality, and ethics. This examination puts forward the idea of a 'maternal performativity', drawing on the work of Judith Butler and numerous other feminist theorists, to offer new ways of looking at 1970s and 1980s literary texts by ten German-speaking women writers, including Barbara Frischmuth, Elfriede Jelinek, Irmtraud Morgner, and Karin Struck. Maternal agency has not adequately been theorized - a project which is urgent, given the traditional view in Western culture of the mother as passive; Butler's notion of performativity can assist in this task. It proposes a performative conception of both mothering and literature, and links both of these to the question of ethics, which is understood as involving embodiment and relationality. To different extents, all of the texts examined depict mothers as marginal, abject, or insane, thus demonstrating the operations of exclusion, and the need for a maternal agency to be developed and enacted. The idea of maternal performativity is refined in five chapters, which focus, respectively, on community, corporeality, the mother-child relationship, the family, and discursive production. The conclusion explores the ethics of literary practice and knowledge production, and argues that in the light of the developing fields of new reproductive technologies and genetics, it is imperative that we seek new understandings of embodiment, community, and care.

Series Statement

• MHRA texts and dissertations ; v. 58
• Bithell series of dissertations ; v. 26

Uniform Title

• Bithell series of dissertations v. 26.
• Texts and dissertations v. 58.

Subject

• Struck, Karin
• Frischmuth, Barbara
• Jelinek, Elfriede
• Morgner, Irmtraud
• Geschichte 1970-1990
• 1900-1999
• Women authors, German > 20th century > Criticism and interpretation
• Feminist theory
• Motherhood

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [181]-189) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : mothering, writing, and performativity -- Ch. 1. Mothering, agency, and community -- Ch. 2. Reconceiving the maternal body -- Ch. 3. Mother and child -- Ch. 4. Rethinking the family -- Ch. 5. Mother tongues -- Conclusion : towards a maternal ethics aesthetics?

ISBN

1904350100

OCLC

• 54043570
• SCSB-12781968

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library