In Subject to Negotiation, Elaine Neil Orr proposes negotiation as
both a state of consciousness and a significant movement for women
writers as well as feminist critics. Challenging the "subversive"
model of feminist criticism, she argues for the importance of
negotiation for feminist practice within a plurality of critical
positions and identities. Without claiming the final word -- indeed
calling for more words on the subject -- Orr sketches an empirical
method for a negotiating feminist criticism and then in successive
chapters demonstrates the method at work.
In the author's hybrid theory. "negotiation" constitutes not
fractious debates between opposing parties but noisy dialogues
between and among subjects whose complex identities overlap a
number of opposing positions. Not surprisingly, Orr draws from
literary critics writing out of working-class, African-American,
Chicana, lesbian, and postcolonial identities, as well as white and
academic ones. What is surprising, she claims, is how five
representative American women writers -- Edith Wharton, Zora Neale
Hurston, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Marge Piercy --
demonstrate the very critical and philosophical movements we see in
contemporary feminist criticism. Feminist critics, like these
writers and their panorama of characters, are necessarily operating
between scenes of power, negotiating their interests across uneven
fields. As Orr demonstrates, American women writers have produced
"negotiating narratives" to accommodate the expectations of their
readership while simultaneously contesting the boundaries of female
subjectivity.
Subject to Negotiation makes compelling reading for scholars of
feminist literary theory, aswell as those interested in
twentieth-century American literature, debates over identity
politics, and theories of narrative.
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