English Department

Sunday, November 23, 2008

BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Faculty Scholarship

DR. KATHERINE J. WEESE, ELLIOTT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

Why Would I Want to Finish It?

Professor Katherine J. Weese in class with
Lucas M. Phillips '11

WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE at Williams College, I clipped a cartoon from the New Yorker Magazine and have carried it around with me ever since, taping it to my various office doors. The cartoon features a man sitting at a typewriter. His desk, located at the bottom of a flight of stairs, is stacked high with numerous piles of books and papers, as is the floor around him—not quite, but almost reminiscent of the former office of Professor Emeritus of Classics John L. Brinkley at Hampden-Sydney College. At the top of the stairs in the cartoon stands the man’s wife, arms crossed, looking down at him disapprovingly. The man looks up the stairs at his wife and says in the caption, “Finish it? Why would I want to finish it?”

At about the same time that this cartoon struck me as apropos for various of my ongoing writing projects, one of my college writing instructors told the advanced composition class I was taking that no piece of writing is ever finished—it is merely abandoned. He was probably paraphrasing some famous writer when he said this. I have forgotten which writer, but I have never forgotten the line. Both its sentiment and the cartoon come to mind as I compose this piece on the intersection of my research and my teaching.

Abandoning the Manuscript

I am just about to turn over a book manuscript to an editor at a press that has issued a contract for an ongoing project. For many years, I thought I’d never finish it, but a research sabbatical in 2006-2007 gave me the time to bring it to completion—or at least to the point where I can abandon it to the publication process. It is time to stop writing and rewriting, in spite of the fact that I could go on endlessly tinkering with sentences, adding one more citation, working in one more idea.

In its first incarnation, this project was my doctoral dissertation, submitted for the Ph.D. degree requirements at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 1993. A few months later, I began teaching English and Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College, and nearly immediately, this project began its long evolution into the manuscript it is today, which bears little resemblance to the dissertation. The changes it has gone through have both influenced and been influenced by the teaching I have done in the interim.

The book examines how the study of feminist narrative practices can enhance readers’ understanding of the role of the fantastic in contemporary women’s literature, and, reciprocally, it demonstrates that reconsidering theories of the fantastic through the lens of feminism can further illuminate contemporary feminist narrative strategies. To illustrate this idea, I develop readings of seven novels written by contemporary women writers: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Paradise.

Having arrived at the College in 1993 after receiving the B.A. degree from Williams College and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Professor Weese was promoted to the rank of full professor in the spring of 2006. She was on sabbatical leave in 2006-07, and at the Commencement ceremonies in May, she was awarded the Thomas Edward Crawley Award given annually to “that professor most distinguished for devoted service to the ideals of Hampden-Sydney and the education of her sons.”

My purpose, in part, is to fill a gap in existing scholarship by bringing together two theoretical discourses that have failed adequately to engage one another. These novels’ fantastic devices work in conjunction with various feminist narrative concerns, such as the authority of the female voice, the implications of narrative form for gender construction, revisions to traditional genre conventions by women writers, and the recovery of alternative versions of stories suppressed by dominant historical narratives. In general, the fantastic introduces an alternative reality that invites both characters within the fiction and readers of the fiction to broaden their world views, especially where the social construction of gender roles is concerned.

Changing Focus

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the way this project has evolved is that it did not begin as a feminist project devoted to women’s fiction. Originally, its theoretical underpinnings had to do with the fantastic and with postmodernism, and the novels I examined included more works written by men than by women. In graduate school, I had studied very little feminist theory; frankly, it didn’t interest me. Then I started teaching at a men’s college, and everything changed.

One of the courses that quickly became a regular part of my teaching load was the English Department’s literary theory and criticism course, which includes a unit on feminist theory. In addition, I was hired to develop courses in contemporary literature, my area of specialization, in which I taught a fair amount of recent fiction and poetry written by women, and in teaching those works, I found it was often useful to employ some feminist theory. Sometimes, students were resistant to women’s literature and to the theory, and one might assume that my interest in this field blossomed in a defensive reaction to my students’ resistance, but the story is a happier one than this. For the most part, my students’ positive interest in feminist literary theory, and their positive, engaged, intellectual responses to many novels written by women, has encouraged me to develop my scholarly interests in the direction that they have taken. In turn, the time spent conducting research has led me to develop new ways of teaching both theory and works of contemporary literature.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty