Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

During the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Women from literary families all wrote letters with an awareness of the possibility of the world reading them. Even as letters were viewed as ostensibly private forms of communication, they were serving an intimate public as a vehicle for public feelings long before publication. Exploring the epistolary remains of three nineteenth-century women writers from literary families, I focus, in particular, on how these writers confronted illness, grief, and death, all things that kept them isolated from others and made correspondence necessary. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death. While Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise, Charlotte Brontë did not write about her death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating on it while she was still living. Instead Bronte focused on her sisters’ deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her life got written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Throughout the study, Virginia Woolf acts as a mediating figure who both engaged in these epistolary practices of bereavement and read and wrote about letter collections from the past. The significance of these letters is how they reflect attitudes towards death and dying in the nineteenth century, particularly in how narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief itself provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement. The work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life. / text

This study provides a critical inquiry into the textual (self-)representations of Chinese females’ perception and experience of “women’s liberation” in 1949-1966 Chinese women’s autobiographical and fictional writings. Through historical and textual analyses, it looks into Chinese women’s multiple textual/discursive practices and their subjectivities constituted in the process. These narrative practices are treated as salient sites of women’s struggle for self-understanding, self-liberating as well as self-inventing in their own specific social and cultural conditions. The study aims to disclose the complexity of the discursive field centering on the topic of socialist women’s liberation and the dynamic interplay between different female authors and the socialist political/gender discourses within 1949-1966 socialist cultural public sphere. The thesis first examines the autobiographical, first-person female narratives appeared on three Fulian(Women’s Federation)–sponsored national and local women’s magazines: Women of China (中国妇女), Beijing Women (北京妇女), and Modern Women (现代妇女). It probes into how female narrators, from different social backgrounds, understand and restructure in their writings their past and present lives in terms of (public) labor, female freedom and new social identification. Secondly, the thesis investigates fictions and plays by female writers, which provide historically-specific gendered perspectives to the issue of “women’s liberation” as well as women’s position in and their relationship with socialism. It explores women’s perception of public and domestic labor, their formation of collective identities in the process of socialist construction, their gender struggle with and contestation to the persistent ideology of patriarchy in the new social order, all of which are revealed in their literary practices. This thesis argues that in these different sorts of writings, the representations of experience of “women’s liberation” are intimately related, but not identical, to the state-sanctioned conceptual and discursive framework. Socialist political and gender discourses actually exert unpredictable, diffuse, locally and individually contingent effects on Chinese women who actively engage in different forms of writing. The self-perception and self-fashioning represented in these women’s cultural practices are enabled by, but may also go beyond, the revolutionary language or state-inflected discourses, indicating more complicated and specific meanings of Chinese socialist ideologies and practices for individual women. Different writers choose or abandon, appropriate or dis-employ, embrace or interrogate, be close to or keep at a distance certain socialist political and gender discourses, in order to forge and interpret women’s experience from their own specific contexts. They may be empowered by the revolutionary discourses and rhetoric, yet they do not identify themselves as mere passive beneficiaries of the socialist regime, but as active agents in their self-liberation and self-transformation. It is in this process that their different subjectivities are constituted, their agency created and asserted. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

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published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation offers the first full-length study of five feminist writing practices developed between May 1968 and the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar in 1990: ecriture feminine (Helene Cixous), ecriture au feminin/writing in the feminine (Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire Tostevin), lesbian/political writing (Monique Wittig), innecriture (Trinh T. Minh-ha), and writing as feminist practice (DuPlessis). These share what I call a feminist poetics; I develop the concept of "sympathy" (the transmission of symptoms from one body to the next) to explain how they nourish one another. I recount their poststructuralist context, and outline key historical influences, such as the student protests of 1968, the nascent women's movements in France and North America, and feminist cultural production in the 1970s. I then describe their poetics---the textual, grammatical, and semantic strategies used to undermine the patriarchal symbolic. I focus on the status and function of the female body in this feminist poetics, and suggest the body provides it with a non-essentialist theoretical foundation. I conclude by evaluating two models that best describe these writing practices: the palimpsest and the matrix. While the palimpsest, with its textual allusions, is an attractive model, I suggest that the matrix offers two advantages: its corporeal connotations and its emphasis on writing as process.