Pioneer in feminist literary studies to speak at UNCW
10/5/2004 10:17:39 AM
E-Mail | Print
Oct. 4, 2004
Wilmington, N.C. - Susan D. Gubar, distinguished professor of English at the University of Indiana, will speak at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s King Hall Auditorium. Her talk, “In Rooms of Our Own,” will be followed by a book signing and reception. Gubar will discuss feminism today and its relevance outside the academy. The lecture is part of the Buckner Lecture Series sponsored by the UNCW Department of English. The event is free and open to the public.
Gubar is best known for her collaboration with Sandra Gilbert, whom she met in 1973. Their highly acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) was a runner-up for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gubar’s recent works include Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), which analyzes cross-racial performances in the arts, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000), which discusses the dilemmas facing feminist theory in the new millennium and Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003). She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and recently spent a year as a Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.
Gubar and Gilbert’s Madwoman in the Attic still stands as a landmark of 1970’s American feminism, encapsulating the strengths of that first decade of “second-wave feminism,” one of the most durable of the sixties’ legacies. They were jointly named Ms. magazine’s Women of the Year in 1986 for their work as editors of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Gubar has focused much of her work on the strategies women have adopted to survive in a male-dominated society, recording what women writers have done and the high costs paid for success. By uncovering the achievements and resistances heretofore unrecorded by official histories of the literary canon, Gubar offers an example of how women writers can create a usable past and how they can speak and write in a world that too often still strives to keep them silent.
The Buckner Lecture Series was established by Charles F. Green III in honor of his friend Katherine K. Buckner to provide funding to bring distinguished guest presenters to UNCW.
|
