Joan Schulz
The English Department at SUNYA, long a hub of teaching interests and course on women in literature, women writers, and feminist criticism, not surprisingly is equally the site of considerable research and publishing activity on women and literature. From papers delivered at conferences and destined for publication through research in progress to articles, anthologies, books, editorships, and even to creative writing, the work of women in the Department makes it truly a critical center of research at SUNYA. Judith Barlow, editor of Plays by American Women: The Early Years, recently organized and moderated a panel discussion entitled "Women Playwrights: An International Conversation". Panelists included women from Chile, The People's Republic of China, and South Africa. Professor Barlow is also doing research on the works of contemporary American dramatist Tina Howe. In addition to a biographical-critical piece on Howe that appeared in Contemporary Dramatists, Judith's "The Art of Tina Howe" is forthcoming in an anthology on contemporary women playwrights; she presented a paper on Howe at the 1988 MLA convention.
Co-editor of Novels in English by Women, 1891-1920, Diva Daims currently has under review Turn-of-the-Century Novels by American Women and Turn-of-the-Century Jewish Women Writers (a series of fifteen neglected autobiographies and novels published between 1891 and 1920); an article entitled "Jewish American Women Writers and the Americanization of Jewish Immigrants"; and an article on Charlotte Parkins Gilman and Amalie Skram, whose lives and works Professor Daims has found "amazingly similar". Two continuing projects engaging Professor Daims' attention are the preparation of a reprint series of British women writers of the turn of the century, and a plan for either a book-length study of immigrant women writers of the period or a collection of essays on the subject.
Judith Fetterley, whose first book, The Resisting Reader, has become a classic of feminist criticism, has also published a second book, Provisions, in which she shifts her attention from male texts to those by women, in this instance, neglected nineteenth-century American women writers. Professor Fetterley has described Provisions as "an experiment in the form of literary criticism: the critical anthology or the book within a book": a reprinting of the primary texts and a presentation of them "in a context that would make them intelligible." Another consequence of her research in the work of nineteenth-century American women writers has been the Rutgers University Press American Women Writers Series, which Professor Fetterley is co-editing and in which she has edited a collection of works by Alice Cary. Fetterley's current research involves work on woman regionalists from 1850-1920, an anthology to be published by Norton Press. She is also working on an experimental critical text, interweaving a reading of the texts with personal narrative. Out of her research has come a new course she will teach, on mothering and reading.
"Female Eroticism, Confession, and Interpretation in Nathaniel Hawthorne," to be published in Nineteenth-Century Literature, is the title of a recent essay by Jennifer Fleischner. Taking issue with conventional readings, her article argues that Hawthorne explores female eroticism as the essential link between the activities of reading and writing, between interpretation and authority; and that the repression of female eroticism results in the repression of interpretation and the end of the male artist's capacity of production. Another woman in the Department working on Charlotte Perkins Gilman is Denise Knight, who has received tentative permission from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in the United States at Radcliffe College to edit the diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Final permission awaits the determination that no one else is working on the same project. Knight is also seeking permission from Radcliffe to edit for publication an unpublished volume of Gilman's poetry, compiled by her long-time friend Amy Wellington.
At the recent National Women's Studies Association Mid-Atlantic Conference, Diane Lunde presented a paper critiquing Women's Ways of Knowing (by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule) from a series of feminist perspectives, including comparing the model offered in Women's Ways of Knowing with her own process of knowing. Diane concludes: "My process tells me that `knowing' (which is never defined by the authors of Women's Way) is a more complex activity, or process, than I can understand by any linear paradigm. And I'm concerned that such paradigms as the one these authors propose, relatively static and reductive as they inevitably are, so easily become prescriptive."
Barbara McCaskill has been invited to submit an essay for Style which will include an evaluation of current feminist approaches to stylistics. Her essay will consider race as a function of stylistics in feminist literary criticism, linguistic strategies, and such other forms of critical discourse as narratology and deconstruction. Her discussion will be included in the 1989 Bibliography number of Style. "Orphaning as Resistance," is the title of a recent essay by Joan Schulz. Examining some eight Southern women writers in light of their resistance to the family, the article will be published in a revisionist anthology on the Southern Literary Renaissance. Professor Schulz' current research interests center on a study of more contemporary Southern women writers and on extending work she has done on lesbian readers and writers.
Kate Winter is about to have her second book, The Woman in the Mountain: Reconstruction of Self and the Land by Adirondack Women Writers, released (January 27, 1989). Professor Winter describes the book as a contribution to the "growing body of knowledge regarding gender-and-writing and writer-and-region... and as a single place where readers interested in women-writing-landscape connections can go for texts and interpretation." Carolyn Yalkut is working on a new play, Changing Room, a comedy about women trapped in a department store dressing room. The cast is all female, dressing and undressing throughout, and the theme is friendship among women.