Biographies of artists and writers have traditionally presented an individual's lone struggle for self-expression. In this book, critics and historians, challenge these assumptions in a series of essays that focus on artist and writer couples who have shared sexual and artistic bonds.
Biographies of artists and writers have traditionally presented an individual's lone struggle for self-expression. In this book, critics and historians, challenge these assumptions in a series of essays that focus on artist and writer couples who have shared sexual and artistic bonds. Featuring duos such as Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and Jasper Johns and Robert Ruaschenberg, this book combines biography with evaluation of each partner's work in the context of the relationship.
This innovative collection challenges the traditional focus on solitary genius by examining the rich diversity of literary couplings and collaborations from the early modern to the postmodern period. Literary Couplings explores some of the best-known literary partnerships—from the Sidneys to Boswell and Johnson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—and also includes lesser-known collaborators such as Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. The essays place famous authors such as Samuel Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats in new contexts; reassess overlooked members of writing partnerships; and throw new light on texts that have been marginalized due to their collaborative nature. By integrating historical studies with authorship theory, Literary Couplings goes beyond static notions of the writing "couple" to explore literary couplings created by readers, critics, historians, and publishers as well as by writers themselves, thus expanding our understanding of authorship.
Wise, compassionate, and highly practical, this engaging text covers the entire process of therapeutic work with couples, from opening sessions and assessment through skills building, core issues, and termination. Students and novice couple therapists learn effective strategies for intervening with couples of any age who are struggling with acute crises or longstanding conflicts and power struggles. Rich with sensitive, detailed case material, the book features numerous exercises that help readers identify and develop their own strengths as practitioners. Self-care strategies and tips for getting the most out of supervision are provided. Special topics include how to address couple issues with only one partner and couple therapy applications for chronic mental health problems.
How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice. “I'm a householder,” the poet Robert Duncan once explained. “My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household.” In this book, Tara McDowell examines the household (physical and conceptual) that Duncan established with the artist Jess, beginning in 1951 when the two men exchanged marriage vows, and ending with Duncan's death in 1988. For Duncan and Jess, the household—rather than the studio, gallery, or collective—provided the support structure for their art. Indeed, McDowell argues convincingly, their work was coextensive with their household. The material surroundings of their house in San Francisco and the daily rhythms of their domestic lives became part of their creative practice. Duncan wrote poetry that is romantic, ornate, and obscure; Jess (born Burgess Franklin Collins) created multi-imaged, complex collages and assemblages. McDowell explores their life and work—reading Duncan and Jess with and against each other, in alignment and misalignment. She examines their illustrated book Caesar's Gate, a collaborative effort that led them to reject collaboration; considers each man's lifelong preoccupation with an unfinished project, Jess's Narkissos and Duncan's The H.D. Book; and discusses their “origin myths” and self-made genealogies, describing them as a form of witness in the face of the calamities of the twentieth century. Duncan and Jess made the household a necessary precondition for their art making. Doing so, they reclaimed and rehabilitated the domestic—from which gay couples were traditionally excluded—for their own uses. The household permitted them to reimagine the world. McDowell's portrait of a couple expands to encompass broader issues, urgent in midcentury America and still resonant today: belonging and kinship, alienation, and catastrophe.
Learn how lesbian couples deal with political, social, and legal issues related to their relationships—and their professions Lesbian Academic Couples is a collection of writings by scholars who examine—in theory and in narrative—issues faced by partners working in the academic field, including the politics of spousal hiring, discrimination in hiring practices, collaboration between partners, long-distance relationships, team teaching, and job sharing. This unique book presents firsthand accounts from senior faculty with lengthy credentials in LGBT scholarship who have been able to land academic positions not compromised by outing, from established academics who have been outed to negative effect, from junior scholars with a queer specialty, and from faculty whose work is constantly shifting and unpredictable. The format of Lesbian Academic Couples is unique. Authors well known to the lesbian communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia, present essays that “converse” with one another, offering opposing positions that represent a diversity of approaches on vital issues. The book offers candid accounts of the experiences of lesbian couples fortunate enough to work in supportive academic environments and from those discouraged from being out on campus or from doing academic work in the area of LGBT studies. This groundbreaking book is especially timely given current lawsuits and legislation involving civil unions and domestic partner benefits, enforcement of domestic violence statutes, and the rights of unmarried older couples. Lesbian Academic Couples includes the stories of couples who: achieved scholarly success and a reaffirmed relationship were separated when they couldn’t find viable academic positions in the same geographical area abandoned the security of tenured positions for the sake of their relationship were professionally marginalized because of their same-sex, mixed-race relationship wrote under the pen name “Michael Field” in the nineteenth century In addition, Lesbian Academic Couples examines the critical issues of: state sanctioning through marriage spousal hiring package plans sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies Lesbian Academic Couples have existed, as long as there have been female academics. This powerful book gives voice to their successes and struggles.
In Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France, Katharine Ann Jensen analyzes the work of three pairs of women writing in French—Genlis and Lafayette, Colette and Annie de Pène, and Nancy Huson and Leïla Sebbar—to assess how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women’s relationships, the author combines close textual readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.
How do gender and race become objects of intellectual inquiry? What happens to marginal discourses when they participate in the academic processes of scrutiny and evaluation? In Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference, Alice Gambrell examines the careers of a group of women intellectuals - Leonora Carrington, Ella Deloria, H. D., Zora Neale Hurston, and Frida Kahlo - whose scholarly rediscovery coincided with the rise of feminist and minority discourse studies in the academy. She examines the exhibitions, memoirs, poems, ethnographies, and personal correspondences these women produced, combining concrete local observation with contemporary theoretical perspectives on race and gender. Through a mixture of empirical detail and theoretical speculation, Gambrell explores the role these women played in expanding the conception of American literature by their involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. She offers new ways of thinking about the relationships between cultural studies, feminism and minority discourse within the ongoing reassessment of modernism.
Although Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault announced the death of the author several decades ago, critics have been slow to abandon the idea of the solitary writer. Bette London maintains that this notion has blinded us to the reality that writing is seldom an individual activity and that it has led us to overlook both the frequency with which women authors have worked together and the significance of their collaborative undertakings as a form of professional activity. In Writing Double, the first full-length treatment of women's literary partnerships, she goes to the heart of issues surrounding authorial identity. What is an author? Which forms of authorship are sanctioned and which forms marginalized? Which of these forms have particularly attracted women? Such questions are central to London's analysis of the challenge that women's literary collaboration presents to accepted notions of authorship. Focusing on British texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she considers a fascinating variety of works by largely noncanonical, and in some instances highly unconventional, authors—from the enormously popular novels composed by writing teams at the turn of the century, to the Brontë juvenilia and the occult scripts of Georgie Yeats and W. B. Yeats, to automatic writings produced by mediums purporting to be in communication with the spirit world.
York explores collaborative writing from women in Britain, the United States, Italy and France, illuminating the tensions in the collaborative process that grow out of important cultural, racial, and sexual differences between the authors.