Abstract
In describing a lecture course that offers a sense of the heterogeneity of American fiction, Schneider argues for the privileging of women’s writing, particularly in a patriarchal country like Romania in which women writers have historically been marginalized. She interrogates the critical assumptions of this course, reviewing feminism and women’s studies and hinting at the very different place they hold in Romanian literary studies. An understanding of the constructedness, ideological motivation, and intersectionality of categories such as identity, gender, race, class, culture, and history informs her analysis. She considers not only the style and rhetoric of the texts assigned for seminar discussions but also their silences and failures of communication, as well as the strategies of resistance, indirection, and displacement to which women often resort both as subjects and as objects of writing. Additionally, Schneider investigates the ideological stakes of the study of identity, whether personal or communal, and the potential for resistance that is inherent in reading practices.
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Notes
- 1.
In the late 1980s, Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw developed a theory of intersectionality to explain the interdependence of various levels—racial, sexual, social, economic, and religious—on which oppression and discrimination are experienced.
- 2.
Ethnic women are comparatively more visible internationally. The Nobel Prize in Literature has had only 16 female laureates out of a total of 117; of these, the two writers awarded the Prize for portraying American realities—Toni Morrison (1993) and Louise Glück (2020)—represent two important ethnic groups in the United States. Internationally, six women garnered the Prize before 1966, the other ten in the years between 1991 and 2020, with an inexplicable 25-year-long gap at the height of the feminist movement.
- 3.
In June 2020, the Romanian Parliament voted massively to ban gender studies in schools. Although the ban was repealed by Romania’s Constitutional Court in December 2020, Parliament’s vote reflects deep-seated and widespread prejudice.
- 4.
In fairness, the M.A. programs in English and American studies at the Universities of Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Bucharest, Iași, and Suceava offer courses in feminist theory and/or gender studies, although not in women’s writing.
- 5.
The initial, 2013 study, detailed in Schneider and Selejan (2015), was confirmed by a new questionnaire undertaken earlier this year: of the 41 respondents, 63% believe separate study modules devoted to women’s and gender studies would make a welcome addition to the curriculum, while 22% are hesitant and 15% perceive no immediate need for them.
- 6.
The study of this homology was inspired by the cultural studies model proposed by Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1987). In the case of the novels studied here, the homology refers to the correspondence between narrative forms and modes of expression, on the one hand, and the concerns, activities and experiences of a certain ethnic group, on the other. Narrative forms and modes thus convey meanings and values that are significant to that group and are best understood in context.
- 7.
May Welland in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) is the only exception.
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Schneider, AK. (2022). Contemporary American Women Writers in Romania. In: Mazzeno, L.W., Norton, S. (eds) Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94166-6_6
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