The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms Book

Since the late 1960s, feminist critics have constructed an alternative canon of works in which women resist being silenced and narrate their stories to other women. Feminist critics have valued, above all else, the effort to discover these women's voices and to put women in dialogue with one another, to identify with the women whose stories they read. With many feminists now arguing for the limits of identification and the importance of differences between women, what is the fate of this canon-building and its methods. In an original rereading of such feminist classics as Jane Eyre, "The Yellow Wallpaper," Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple, Kaplan focuses on how each work represents "talk" and how feminist critics have talked about those representations. Quite often, and especially in African-American women's texts, the narrator frustrates the readers' expectations and dramatizes the difficulties of getting in on "the cultural conversation." This performative strategy, Kaplan argues, has not been sufficiently accounted for. Uncovering how authors and characters long for an ideal listener--"the erotics of talk"-- Kaplan shows that the absence of that listener works as a rich political allegory and covert form of social critique. Kaplan proposes a new model for understanding and representing "talk," one built on the conflicts and differences in feminism's contentious legacy. Feminism's health and future, she asserts, are in the strength of its conflicts. Through them, women can find the tools needed to bridge the boundaries between African American and white women's writing.Read More