Xu Lei Dan Han Song Liu Huining
【Editor's Note】
On the afternoon of May 22, Nanjing Vientiane Bookstore held a dialogue entitled "Gender Struggle in the History of English Literature - How to Curb Women's Writing", which was discussed by Xu Lei, professor of the English Department of Nanjing University, Dan Hansong and Liu Huining, editor of Nanjing University Press. The Paper was authorized by the organizer to publish a transcript of the audio recording of the dialogue. Because the content is too long, it is divided into two articles, which is the first part.
Lecture site
Liu Huining: Thank you very much for your interest in the book "How to Stop Women's Writing" and come to Vientiane Bookstore to listen to this dialogue. Today we are fortunate to invite two professors from the English Department of Nanjing University, Xu Lei and Dan Hansong, both of whom are experts in English and American literature and literary theory, Xu Lei also studies women's literature, but Han Song is also engaged in book review writing and literary translation. The book was published a few months ago, and since its publication, it has received a lot of attention from readers, and now has more than 1,000 people rating it on Douban, with a rating of up to 9 points. This was both unexpected and unexpected, because I also felt a deep resonance when I wrote this book. When I was an English student, I knew that women's perspectives were different from men's perspectives, and that literary canons sometimes tended to favor male perspectives. But before reading this book, I did not think very seriously and concretely, such as the heavy housework, the expectation of motherhood, etc., how to hinder women's writing. The book's author, the American science fiction writer Joanna Russ, tells us in rich illustrations and irony how women have been inhibited on the road to writing. For example, the American writer Tillie Lerner Olsen once wrote: "After doing housework and taking care of her husband and children, I am often exhausted, often have the urge to write, and often lose." She said, "My work is dead." Charlotte Brontë gave her poems to the English Romantic poet Robert Southey, who replied: "Literature cannot be a woman's life's work, nor should it be." "How to Suppress Women's Writing was first published in the United States more than 30 years ago, but it's still outdated today, which is why many readers are able to empathize. Let's ask the two teachers to talk about what they want to share with us after reading this book.
Lei Xu: "How to Suppress Women's Writing," the title itself is sensational, sounding a lot like "How to prepare for the TOEFL test in 10 days" or "How to make my mother-in-law like me," more like a guide to action. But when you open the book, you will find that the content of the book is actually a list of crimes listed by the female writer Russ in order to suppress women's writing, there are 11 crimes, such as resistance, just now Editor Liu also talked about, that is, when you want to write, you find the shackles of the mother's office, as a housewife, you have to bear various family responsibilities, which deprives women of the time to write. The third is self-deception, which if you are familiar with Sartre's philosophy, you know that it means "bad faith"; there is also the double standard of depriving the author, denigrating the author, and the content.
This list, at least gives me the feeling of being deafening and déjà vu. What is shocking is that women's literature really has to face so much resistance? But if you think about it, especially if you put this book in the field of the early 1980s, it is true that in that era, at least in the English-speaking world, the pressure on women writers was beyond the imagination of contemporary Chinese readers. So I wondered, what is the historical significance of this book. We can look at these charges first. For example, in the third article, she speaks of the deprivation of authorship, of the works of many famous female writers in the history of Anglo-American literature, or of the works of many famous women writers in the history of English and American literature, or that they are now famous but have been submerged and marginalized in the history of literature. To give you an example, everyone knows F.S. Fitzgerald who wrote The Great Gatsby, but probably few people know that his wife Zelda Fitzgerald was actually a great novelist, and even according to Zelda Fitzgerald's biographer, F.S. Fitzgerald also plagiarized many of his wife's works in some way, then of course these works may be more diaries, letters, these unpublished texts. So when we go to see "The Great Gatsby" today, you may wonder if the part about Daisy is really from F.S. Fitzgerald's pen. In addition, there are actually many celebrities around the people, such as Wordsworth, we all know that Wordsworth is a famous lakeside poet representative, is the early 19th century Romantic master, but few people know that he also has a sister, less than two years younger than him. This sister is seen by many literary critics as a literary handmaiden (literary handmaiden) of the great poets. When my brother was thinking and creating, my sister made him snacks, washed vegetables and cooked, and even collected various things she encountered on the road, and came back to tell her brother, "This thing may be put into your "The Solitary Reaper" ('The Solitary Reaper') and write a poem on this theme" and so on. But in fact, his sister's name is Dorothy Wordsworth, and she also writes poetry, but no one knows her poems. Of course, in the process of excavating women's literary classics, her poems were discovered. I think this is a good example of being "stripped of authorship".
Here's another one, john Mill, who is well known, the one who wrote On Liberty, who actually has a place in the history of British women's literature and feminist criticism, because he once published a very heavyweight article in 1869 called "The Subjection of Women". In this long essay, he openly admits that many of his views and positions are directly due to the fact that his wife, who died more than 10 years ago, is a woman like Harriet Taylor Mill. Through his approval, we know that although the work is titled after John Mueller, in fact his wife gives him the most direct material or ideological sustenance. Then I think "stripping the author" should also be looked at in two parts, not all authors will be suppressed, overwhelmed, I don't know what F.S. Fitzgerald thought when he plagiarized from his wife, but objectively caused this harm. But in John Mueller, we see a different picture of him still recognizing his contribution more than 10 years after her death. So with regard to "deprivation of authorship," I think we can think further.
I saw that the fourth article had "denigrating the author" in it, which I thought was very interesting. It quotes the American critic Elaine Reuben as saying, "One of the criteria used to judge female intellectuals is her figure, her hair, her ability to swear." After hearing it, do you think that it can arouse a standard association with some writers at the moment, especially the so-called female writers, when the media promotes or when judging? We will think of many writers who, when they enter the market, are called "beautiful writers" under a very familiar name, as if writers are not beautiful women, they cannot be recognized by the public.
But Han Song: There are also "beautiful male writers".
Xu Lei: Yes, there are also beautiful male writers, which must be linked to external attraction, and it seems that this writer's selling point in the market has increased.
Then I think this is not a denigration of the author, but in a way, such a praise is to distract attention from her artistic creativity or academic value, in fact, in a sense, it is a denigration of the author's own artistic value and creative power, I think it can be regarded as another kind of denigration.
But Han Song: I've known Hui Ning for a long time, I taught her in her freshman year, and a lot of important women's texts may have been read in my class, so she was also quite influenced. The book she made, I think, is a rare book that the author has edited for her, so without any cover design, just put these words in Chinese and English on the cover, the book may sell at least 20,000 copies.
Look at these words written:
She didn't write. / She wrote, but she shouldn't have written. / She wrote it, but look at what she wrote. / She wrote it, but she wasn't really an artist. / She wrote it, but she wrote it. / She wrote it, and it was only for reluctant reasons that it seemed interesting. / She wrote, but she accepted help from others. / She wrote it, but she was a freak. / She wrote, but she was a slut / She wrote, but she didn't have children / She wrote, but she divorced several times...
So these words, which are actually more sensational in my opinion, are like what Teacher Xu just said, which is a distinctive feature of this book and an indictment of a very radical feminist. Because it is an indictive text, there will be a strong adrenaline rushing stimulation when reading, there are many exclamation points, many sentences are very short and crisp, there is a kind of overwhelming power, constantly circulating. As a male reader, I still feel like I'm on top.
How to Stop Women's Writing
The book is also quite academic. As a literature teacher in the English Department, I am certainly no stranger to the fact that women have been suppressed and repressed in the history of literature. I was educated in the English department, which has always been a place that pays more attention to liberalism and pays more attention to women's rights issues. Even so, when I opened the book, I was shocked, because the book is a "repository of incriminating evidence." It's hard for me to imagine where author Joanna Russ found so much incriminating evidence. I knew that male power was guilty, but when so many citations were piled together, I was still shocked, because it actually had a very strong shock. So "Facts speak louder than words, and while there are also eloquents, there is another powerful rhetorical force that so many facts are laid out here."
But I'm not here today to say that I only praise this book as good, because we do critical research, and I still hope that I have a more dialectical view when reading this book. I think to pay attention to the times, this book was written in the early 1980s, maybe a lot of content began to brew in the 70s, that should be the second wave of feminist movement period, that period a lot of the situation, the situation is actually not the same as our current situation. In the book, for example, she complains that Alice Monroe was ignored and regarded as a "local writer," but we know that she later won the Nobel Prize in Literature; louise Glück, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was also a woman. At the same time, the American university textbooks of the 70s of the last century are very different from the present, and now that various anthologies of women's literature, including the Norton Literary Anthology, are emerging in an endless stream, the proportion of female writers is definitely not only 6%-8% as the book says, although it is not necessarily to 50%, but it should be said that there has been a very big progress. Moreover, after the 1980s, there was a very important "Culture war" in the United States, and identity politics began to become a very prominent problem in American colleges. Women writers, minority writers, postcolonial writers, etc., with strong marginal marks of identity, challenge the taste of the literary canon represented by the "old white man" like Harold Bloom in this book, and resolutely confront them. It should be said that after the Culture Wars, Harold Bloom actually felt that he was out of power, and his time was far away. So Harold Bloom frowned every time he came out, his eyebrows were all screwed together, and then he called feminists "school of resentment" and so on, because he knew that the English department was no longer their domain. Many faculty positions in the European and American English Departments are now recruited according to this kind of research direction, not to say that they want to study which century literature, but to recruit postcolonial directions, queer theory or feminist literature. These characteristic positions and faculty positions slowly enriched the women's literature research community in North America and Europe. After there are more such teachers, the teaching materials will certainly be different, the composition of students will be different, and then the disciples and grandchildren taught by these students will be different in the future, and the book market will begin to change. So now women's subjectivity is not the same state as it was thirty or forty years ago, which is the history of this book.
There is another place that I don't know if I should talk about it properly, but I still want to talk about it. Because the book is written in the form of a "warehouse of incriminating evidence", the author constantly throws out some evidentiary testimony to accuse such societies or groups. But because the examples are usually relatively short, many are intertwined, some are out of context, may not be entirely reasonable, and do not necessarily represent the views of the quoted author, but she still uses it as evidence. So this strong emotional tendency of the author may in some places influence her judgment. Let me give you a simple example, for example, there is a page where she mentions a famous American art historian named Linda Nochlin, and I also use her book on realism in my Western Literature class. Nocklin is a very famous art historian, and one of her most famous papers in the 1970s and 1980s was titled "Why Are There No Great Female Artists?" 》（“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ）。 In this place our author Russ quotes her first paragraph: "There is really no female artist who can be compared or equal to Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Cézanne, Picasso and others." She grabbed this sentence and began to "fire the cannon": on what basis is this true? Aren't there other great female artists I know? On what basis did she say great, was it necessary? "It is obviously enough to have a Picasso in any rational age", Russ says this is obviously incorrect, and so on. Such allegations are out of context. Any reader who finishes Norcklin's very long paper will understand that Nocklin is not saying that this is an indisputable fact, she just points out that this is a fact that many of us assume, but in fact the concept of "greatness" needs to be redefined, the concept of "genius" needs to be deconstructed, and so on. She talks about a lot of retrospectives later, including the training system of artists, why can't women learn to paint in Europe? Because at that time, nude sketching, men could draw male nudes and female nudes, but society could not accept women to paint male nudes, because it was a bad thing. This is a very large threshold, because society has opinions on this matter, so women have no way to enter the academy to learn painting, and at that time, many paintings were because they had to follow the master, like a guild, but also to do apprenticeships. Women have no way to enter the apprenticeship system, after all, an unmarried woman, following a male master has been learning to paint, daily living is very inconvenient, so we can give many such examples to tell us why the West did not produce great female artists on a par with Rembrandt, she actually did not denigrate or belittled women in the end, but made a very good analysis of the material environment of artistic production at that time. So such a very progressive, feminist text was actually targeted by Russ in this book. So I think sometimes Russ is too fierce, and that would hurt some people by mistake. But even so, I still admire her erudition very much, because some things are not googled, not to mention that there was no Google at that time, she must have been very young in the collection of incriminating evidence, saving a lot, when writing to be able to influence the source.
Xu Lei: Just now, Teacher Dan talked about the historical context of the 1980s, in fact, I also want to make some small expansions in this regard. Because when Russ wrote this book, it was as if he was shouting loudly in the wilderness, saying that our women lacked literary traditions, and that women's writing was suppressed in all kinds, as if her cries were unprecedented and unprecedented. If this kind of contextual recognition of the book were made, I think it might create some misunderstandings about the study of feminist literature in the 1980s, including the study of feminist criticism. There are a few texts that I think must mention, but the teacher also talked about it just now, saying that this book is actually very academic. Indeed, there are several works in the academic context of this book that must haunt it. One is Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, combing through more than 100 years of Anglo-American literary tradition from the 19th century, primarily the Victorian era, through Doris Lessing, to 1977, when the book was published. This book should be said to be an important academic resource floating above "How to Suppress Women's Writing". The second book, Ellen Moers's 1976 book, called Lighterary Women: The Great Writers, literary women: The Great Writers, remains an important female writer in the history of British and American literature since the late 18th century. So with these two books there as her literary material, we can imagine that even in 1983, Russ's book was definitely not a lone sound, it may not even be a real pioneer, because the real pioneers who talk about women and writing, if you push a little further, you will find that in 1929, there was a woman writer who published a very important work, which was based on Newnham at Cambridge University One of the books rewritten from the two lectures by College and Girton College is called A Room of One's Own, and I think this may be a very important frame of reference for How to Stop Women's Writing.
"A Room of Your Own"
Because I think that when Russ writes these incriminating evidence, she is often not only accusing the patriarchal society and patriarchal culture of how it suppresses the impulse of women to write and hurt their enthusiasm for creation, but actually tries to do a cross-time dialogue with Woolf to a greater extent. If you open the book, you will find that it is not only from some details of her direct reference to Woolf, but also from indirect commentary. In particular, we know that when Woolf opened her A Room of Her Own, she began by saying that she had accepted a task and had been invited by the university to give a lecture on women and writing, and of course we know that at the end of the book she concluded that if a woman wanted to write, she had to have her own room and earn £500 a year. She places particular emphasis on financial independence to ensure that women are free to write, explore her spiritual world, and show her inner emotions and imagination to the world. But Russ's book, too often, is a target for Woolf. Just now, the teacher also said that Russ's firepower was particularly fierce, and then hit a lot of such seniors in the literary world or the theoretical circles who may not have been hit, and even Nochlin, an important researcher in the field of aesthetics that the teacher just mentioned. I think her target is clearly pointing unbiasedly at Woolf. Why do I say that? Because Russ has a large number of direct references to Woolf's evaluation of female writers in the book. Russ thinks Woolf has an overly negative view of many female writers. Woolf, for example, thinks Charlotte Bronty is overly enthusiastic, her imagination is a little out of control, a little off the mark, and then she doesn't really appreciate Jane Austen unconditionally. Woolf argues that Jane Austen's slow-motion country sketches on two-inch ivory panels are too narrow in scope, and that it may not be a woman's specialty to really describe society or war. So in these respects, Russ was very unhappy with Woolf. And not only that, but she also gave woolf a lot of advice to writers, including woolf's words I quoted here: "Even a woman's slightest grievance, or the reasonable pursuit of any goal, or the conscious speech to women, or the conscious speech in the status of a woman, is fatal." It is this that Russ also has her opinion on what Woolf said about writing in a "hermaphrodite" state. Russ argues that such an approach is in fact divorced from the concrete historical context, requiring that era with vague criteria, for example, that women in the twenties and 1930s could not be separated from their own identity, that they must be writing as a woman, and woolf's standard for female writers is obviously unrealistic. In particular, Woolf is a British white woman from the upper class, well educated, to speak for all women, whether there is enough representation, whether her words can exhaust the voice of every female writer, this Russ is a strong question.
Then when I think of Russ's critique of Woolf, I can't help but think of the Elaine Showalter I just talked about, in her A Literature of Their Own, she actually divides the female literary tradition into three stages, the first stage is this feminine stage, called the feminine stage; the second stage is the feminist stage, called the feminist stage; and the third stage is called the thea female stage。 The first phase is marked by the death of George Eliot, from 1840 to 1880; the second, the feminist phase, from 1880 to 1920; and then the third stage is the female stage just mentioned, 1920 to the present. Then she thinks that these three stages have a very striking sign, that is, the emergence of each stage is represented by this rebuttal and criticism of the previous stage by one stage, and if the first stage is established in this, for Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, the female stage they created, that means to kill the angel in the house, then this angel is Jane Austen; for feminist novelists, that angel is George Eliot. For the novelists of the mid-20th century, that angel was Woolf himself. Then if you think of such a sentence, you can understand why Russ is so resistant to Woolf, I think the reason is already obvious, because she wants to establish a new literary tradition of women since 1980, then what she has to do is to kill Woolf as a benchmark and label for women's writing stage, so Woolf The value she bears is not only women and the initiators of the topic of writing, but equivalent to the current women to establish their new traditions, their new voice, The authority that must be dissolved, a potential authority only. But the question arises, is Russ really just going to knock Woolf down with a stick? In fact, there is no, although she has produced a lot of this evidence, saying that Woolf's standards for women are too strict or too idealistic, but in fact, in many places throughout the text, you can still see her echo of Woolf. There is a small detail I want to share with you, because Russ is a science fiction novelist, and before she published this work, she actually won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the world's famous fantasy novels, science fiction and other heavyweight awards. So when writing this book, in addition to listing the incriminating cases, she also interspersed a little bit of alien perspective during the period. So at the beginning of the book, she fictionalizes a group of people from an alien planet called GrotoRog, and then what happens to their planet? They are actually divided into two kinds of people, one is a long-spotted, long crescent-finned, long-spined Grotorog, the other is a long-term snail fin Oforog, in fact, here, the criticism of patriarchal culture to suppress women's writing words have been encrypted into a gap between two slightly different forms of people on the alien planet, you imagine that one of them is a crescent-shaped fin shape, the other human fin shape is a conch fin type, such a difference that is not inhumane to the outside world. If you distinguish between the two kinds of people on this planet, then the former is considered a low group of people, who are not qualified and incapable of fantasizing or writing this kind of literature, then the latter kind of people, of course, you can imagine that it is such a group of people who dominate on this planet. This seems to be a little superfluous, and I can't help but think that in "A Room of Your Own", everyone knows that Woolf is also very interesting, and she also creates fictional scenes when she talks about women and novels or women and literature. She imagined herself walking by the Sword River, didn't she? Then I conceived that I was going to write something for the topic of "Women and Fiction", so she slowly wandered from the sword river, and suddenly her thinking was disturbed by the boats swinging in the river, in order to be able to stabilize her thinking, to find more inspiration, she went to the university library and so on, and then of course encountered some things along the way, including being shouted by the library administrator that you can't come in because you are a woman, you can't come in without a letter of introduction, etc. Then she fictionalizes myself, and at the same time she tells the reader that she says you can call me by any name, but I'm just that who I am. Woolf, however, was reluctant to materialize "me," the speaker, or to seat herself in a named counterpoint, preferring to remain an outsider neutral as a speaker. Also in Russ's book, we see that in order to facilitate the expression of her point of view, Russ fictionalized the position dispute between two groups of people on the outer planet, and the person with crescent fins on her body felt that she was marginalized, but hoped to gain the right to speak and get the right to write. And the Groto Rog, who dominates the planet, thinks you are nothing, you don't have the intelligence, physical ability, brain capacity to create literature. So here, I think there is a secret connection between the two writers, and even contains the reference of the younger generation to the forerunners. There is also a connection, perhaps more direct. Russ said that in "A Room of Your Own", Woolf once lamented that this era (that is, the 1920s) is not suitable for female poets, and the real poets will appear 100 years later. So here Russ took Woolf's words, she said, "100 years later? Oh my God, is this pretentious upper-class woman too introverted to leave her study, not to believe in any great cause, or to be limited by the life of a noble lady? Was she too lazy or uneducated to know that the poetic temperament had already appeared? Not 100 years later, but more than 60 years ago... Would she have never read Emily Dickinson's poetry? Here's another time when we see Russ responding to Woolf, and of course this response is a little bit critical, or disagreeable. But it seems to me that Woolf seems to have been set up as a target in this text, her introduction of this topic of Russ, including the unfolding of arguments, is of great significance. I won't dwell on it here, because in fact, in addition to woolf's A Room of Your Own, it also takes care of woolf's important article in 1938 called "Three Guineas," which also contains a great deal of this innuendo or direct reference.
Liu Huining: Just now the teachers also mentioned the problem of proportion, the proportion of bibliography in the English department of the university, at least now it is not the proportion of 7% or 8%. So do the two of you have any considerations when choosing articles for your own courses? Have gender issues been given special consideration?
Xu Lei: I mainly focus on the history of English literature, both for undergraduates and graduate students, and try to balance the two sexes in the selection of course materials. But because of the large proportion of male writers and the low proportion of women in the main part of literary history, we tried to include the most classic female writers in the limited one-semester course, usually Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Woolf. However, in literature since the 20th century, the proportion of female writers in general has increased significantly. That's like Doris Lessing, because she was a Nobel laureate, and then like A.S. Byatt, including if you're in the graduate classroom, there's a higher percentage of female writers, and we'll have Muriel Spark, a famous woman writer from the fifties and sixties, and people like Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and then some more recent ones like Zadie Smith. There will also be some involved, such as Sarah Waters. That is, the more the late 20th century, especially since the 1990s, the proportion of female writers will become higher and higher, which may be related to the gradual increase in the attention of female writers in the literary world. But objectively speaking, if we only consider the structure of literary history, it may still be mainly in accordance with the traditional literary history clues, the proportion of male writers will still be relatively high, and it can only be said that after the 1960s, the proportion of female writers will increase relatively.
But Hanson: Because I do American literature and then mainly study fiction, it may not be particularly appropriate to admit it on this occasion today, but the writers I love the most are really white male writers. Because in fact, the two stages that I am most interested in, one is American modernism. There was an open class at Yale, a female professor of Chinese descent, and that class was famous, and she talked about three writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, so these are the three pillars, they represent different styles, and they hold up the pantheon of American modernism, so I love these three writers. I'm also interested in postmodern writers, and among the postmodern writers, my favorites are also three white males, one is Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., one is Don DeLillo, and the other is Philip Milton Roth, and I can add Cormac McCarthy, so I'm in my own class. In fact, to curb this impulse of mine, I cannot bring my preference to a class dominated by female students.
So my Anglo-American fiction class usually talks about four female writers, starting with Jane Austen, but I don't talk about Jane Austen because she's a woman writer, but because she's the greatest writer, and it's in literary history; the other is Woolf, and the other is Eudora Welty, Verti's "A Curtain of Green," which I think is a very high mountain in the short story. The other one I tell every year is Alice Monroe, and alice Monroe's story is called "Carried Away," and I don't get tired of reading it. In our other classes, including Introduction to Literature, we read like Margaret Atwood, susan Keating Glaspell, and so on. But I still calculated that women writers account for about 30-40%, and certainly less than 50%. My position is this, there are some things that are actually fait accomplis of history, that is, in the history of literature, because there is such a social and cultural mechanism, it causes a large number of female writers to have no way to enter the literary canon, then we may have to correct the deviation on the one hand, but on the other hand, we can't put some writers who are actually not first-class in our classroom for the sake of this gender ratio, because this is a zero-sum game, a semester only has 16 weeks of classes, if you add a new writer to come in, It's about moving an old writer out. American textbooks are also like this, you see the Norton Literary Anthology, it can't add all the female writers, because if you add it, then the book is too thick, it's very thick now, more than 900 pages, right? Then one goes in and one goes out. This is actually a very cruel thing.
Xu Lei: I would like to add that there is a special Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
But Han Song: In fact, this matter is sometimes unreasonable, because I have a feeling that the history of literature is actually a history of disappearance, that is, not only female writers are missing, but also a large number of male writers are also missing. In the era when Jane Austen first wrote, there were a large number of female writers active in the British literary scene, and she was not a lone star, and suddenly lit up. Then in the time of Jane Austen, many of her peers like Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Turner Smith, Maria Edgeworth, etc., were much bigger than her, and they were very popular with British readers. She is just a rising star among these female writers. But the history of literature now does not know them, they have disappeared. They disappeared and left only Jane Austen, so that we talk about English literature as if it were very abrupt, that is, a sudden burst of sunny thunder, and then Jane Austen came out, but it was not like this, there was a soil of female writers of the same generation, and then it was made. There are also many male writers who have disappeared, because of the rise of the feminist movement, in fact, objectively speaking, many white male Anglo-Saxon writers have been forced to withdraw from the canon. My PhD thesis was on Thornton Wilder, known as one of the four most important writers in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neil. But when I began to study Thornton Wilder and the translator Thornton Wilder, there was no longer him, American textbooks no longer taught him, and he was no longer included in the anthology. Because he's a white male, Anglo-Saxon, where do you go about it? When he comes out, the others can go in. So it's actually very cruel, and literary history, especially classical actions, are often full of randomness, but they also have cultural and political implications.
Xu Lei: Indeed, whether it is the Norton Literary Anthology or the Norton Women's Literature Anthology, the struggle between writers, according to today's words, is actually quite "involuted", it is true that Thornton Wilder was squeezed out of the ranks of literary classics, in fact, many writers in the female writers, women's literary traditions, you just cited so many writers in the Jane Austen era, including Some writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney. They are basically unknown. It was only in 1985, when Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar co-edited The Norton Women's Literary Anthology, that their work slowly became accessible to more readers. So now I stand in the perspective of women, women's literature has been suppressed for so many centuries, so many years, they should also bottom out, then there are some more opportunities to be known by readers, it seems to be worth it, it should be said that history has given them a little justice, justice can be late, but never absent, is not it? So I personally feel that I am not doubting wilder's greatness, that maybe his work will enter the stage of the play, be adapted by playwrights in different places, and he will have his active stage. But for the novelist, for the female poet, if her words and works are separated from the paper, they may really have no life, and life cannot last. So at this point, I feel that Wilder was forced to leave the ranks of the classics and seems to have gained a new lease of life elsewhere, and this inheritance has not been interrupted by this, at least but the teacher is not doing Wilder's research?
Liu Huining: I would also like to confess a little, that is, as a female student in the English department, in fact, I have not easily experienced the charm of some white male writers in the course. But the female writers I come into contact with, I can easily feel the charm of the language style, for example, and then there is emotional and psychological empathy. For example, when talking about modernism, woolf and Joyce are often compared together, but I like Woolf very much, and joyce is an ordinary feeling.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Ding Xiao