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Women's
Autobiography and the Technology of Writing
When we talk within
Western culture about "women's writing," and especially women's autobiographical
writing, what exactly do we mean? While we have a long historical record
of men's writing-- histories, geographies, scientific and mathematical
treatises, as well as literary productions-- poems, plays, novels and autobiographies--
there are far fewer "women's texts" readily available for us to study.
This raises questions
both about what kinds of writing a culture produces and the ways in which
that writing is produced. "Writing" always involves some materials, and
the materials culturally available for "writing" evolve with a culture's
development of new technologies. Historically, Western practices of writing
and the materials for writing have evolved from less complex technologies,
such as parchment and quill pens and plant based inks, through increasingly
complex technologies, such as mass-produced pulp paper, the printing press,
and contemporary computer. Who can "write" depends on several things:
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Who has access to the
materials necessary to write? Typically, only the upper classes, who could
purchase them, or the educated, individuals in the religious orders or
the universities whose work involved reading and writing (and who were
generally also from the ranks of the upper-class;
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Who in a culture can
read? Traditionally, only the upper classes were literate, and hence the
only individuals in a culture who had the first skill necessary to writing;
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How is written work
reproduced and distributed to a reading audience, and how does the reading
audience find out about and read the texts produced?
When we consider writing
as a technology within cultures organized around social and legal codes
determining how men, women, minorities, and the poor can use their time,
energy, and intellects, we can see that the uneven representation of writing
in our historical record is a more complex issue than we might at first
have thought. No wonder illiterate slaves left so few texts from the early
days of America. No wonder so few poor women ever wrote a word. But there
are texts available by early American slaves, by working-class women, by
persecuted minorities. This writing points out gaps in the historical record--
it represents voices that have been left out of the dominant cultural "story"--
and it forces us to ask what kinds of writing have been culturally valued
and why. What counts as "good" "literature" in a culture? Who counts as
a credible "author"? And how is this all related to writing as a technology
and the economic conditions determining the production, distribution, and
dissemination of texts?
Women's Autobiography
and the Technology of Writing will take up all of these questions from
the writing and reading position of "the Home page" in the evolving Internet
culture. Beginning with the collaborative class Home page, which all participants
in the class collectively "write" to represent their understanding of the
premises and questions of the course, what we are reading and what we are
writing, the class participants will be engaged in critically thinking
about self representation: how does the collaborative class Home page represent
the personalities in the class, the "work" we are doing, the conflicts
we have to negotiate, our desires, frustrations, successes? Our focus on
issues of self representation in a digital culture includes exploring questions
such as:
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How do we define the
audience/s for whom we pose/write ourselves, and how is the Internet-based
"audience" of a digital culture different than "audience" in a print culture?
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What counts as "text"
in the emerging digital culture, and how do we "make"-- write, publish,
distribute-- texts? Different forms of text flourish under different technologies
of textual production; the novel, for instance, was only possible after
the technology of the printing press. What are the forms "writing" is taking
in our emerging digital culture and how might the forms of writing change
as our technologies of writing change?
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How does the technology
of writing in a digital culture change the possibilities of "writer" and
"reader", of who writes and who reads?
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What are the economics
of this new culture and how are these different than the economics of the
culture from which we are emerging?
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How is our posing/writing
different in a digital medium including images, sounds, and text than it
is in a primarily text based print medium?
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What are the future
directions we can imagine for this digital culture and the new figures
of "writer" and "reader" emerging in it? How, for instance, can we imagine
Web TV changing the roles of author/writer/actor, for instance? (As an
example of this, consider the rising number of Internet users whose web
sites run live video from the digital cameras placed throughout their homes:
any person can be a "movie" star on the Internet! How might "living" in
front of a camera and for an audience involve writing/scripting a life?)
In order to think these
issues through, we will be reading:
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Rigoberta Menchu's I,
Rigoberta Menchu and Crossing Borders
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selections from:
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Sidonie Smith's A
Poetics of Women's Autobiography
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Martine Watson Brownley
and Allison B. Kimmich's Women and Autobiography
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The Personal Narratives
Group's Interpreting Women's Lives
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From Gail E. Hawisher
and Cynthia L. Selfe's Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies,
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Susan Romano's "On Becoming
a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self"
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Gail E. Hawisher and
Patricia A. Sullivan's "Fleeting Images: Women Visually Writing the Web"
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Cynthia Haynes' "Virtual
Diffusion: Ethics, Techni and Feminism at the End of the Cold Millennium"
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Web sites and electronic
discussion forums featuring women's digital testimonial/ Autobiographical
writing
Through Menchu's work
and our two primary theoretical texts, Poetics and Interpreting
Women's Lives, we will explore the cultural and material conditions
of self representation, including issues of translation, intertextuality,
domestic and international politics, economics, group and individual identity
formation, and social/cultural evolutions. With
Passions, we will
move from print to digital culture and think through the ways in which
the cultural and material conditions of self representation are changing.
An important part of our reading and research will involve finding women's
autobiographical Internet sites and electronic discussion forums. Our research
will serve in part to name the specific terms of the changing material
conditions of textual production and distribution: what is the architecture
of digital text storage? How do we locate Internet sites? How are they
maintained and what does this mean for the long-term stability of texts
and audiences? How does two-way communication-- E-mail links, chat rooms,
bulletin boards and guest lists-- change the relationship between "reader"
and "writer"?
Our research and
thinking will help us with the primary writing of this class-- our own
personal Home pages and web sites. Writing text, selecting background colors,
images, fonts, page layouts, "advertising" and "distributing" our "writing,"
all require choices about self representation that say something about
how we define ourselves to ourselves and to our imagined "worlds" and how
we define the "world/s" we represent ourselves to. We will use our reflections
on issues of self representation to think more closely about the choices
for self representation other writers make. In this way, we will be working
on both a theory and a practice of self representation. |