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hawkwing_lbBooks 2012: 14
nonfiction
14. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. WW Norton, 1995. First published 1979.
Rich remains interesting to me, as much for what she isn't (conscious, much, of feminism outside of the United States, viscerally aware of the working-class experience) as for what she is (feminist, a woman writing to women, a women steeped in the English canon where it comes to formative literary experiences, intellectually aware of her own privilege and conflict vis-à-vis the systems in which she finds herself, for better or worse a poet). Against the experience of reading Joanna Russ's nonfiction, Rich's wit is less scathing, her critique less acutely visionary. You have the feeling she'd be a milder person to debate.
Russ's nonfiction speaks to me on more levels. We still don't share a native tongue, but the world we see has more overlap, I think, than the world Rich sees and directs her writing at. Where Russ appears to me to address (abruptly, with caustic impatience at the foibles of fools) anyone who cares to listen, Rich is an essentially American thinker, an American poet, an American woman. There's nothing wrong with being limited - or choosing to limit oneself - by the geography of one's intellect, of course. I'm just reminded frequently, reading Rich, that I am other to her. Geographically, experientially, physically, intellectually, politically. And while I find her work interesting...
Huh. I have just realised. It makes me defensive about my perspective. About my experience as an Irishwoman, an experience of the world not seen from within the nation with the world's biggest muscle. An experience characterised by being outside the standard Anglophone frames of reference.
nonfiction
14. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. WW Norton, 1995. First published 1979.
Rich remains interesting to me, as much for what she isn't (conscious, much, of feminism outside of the United States, viscerally aware of the working-class experience) as for what she is (feminist, a woman writing to women, a women steeped in the English canon where it comes to formative literary experiences, intellectually aware of her own privilege and conflict vis-à-vis the systems in which she finds herself, for better or worse a poet). Against the experience of reading Joanna Russ's nonfiction, Rich's wit is less scathing, her critique less acutely visionary. You have the feeling she'd be a milder person to debate.
Russ's nonfiction speaks to me on more levels. We still don't share a native tongue, but the world we see has more overlap, I think, than the world Rich sees and directs her writing at. Where Russ appears to me to address (abruptly, with caustic impatience at the foibles of fools) anyone who cares to listen, Rich is an essentially American thinker, an American poet, an American woman. There's nothing wrong with being limited - or choosing to limit oneself - by the geography of one's intellect, of course. I'm just reminded frequently, reading Rich, that I am other to her. Geographically, experientially, physically, intellectually, politically. And while I find her work interesting...
Huh. I have just realised. It makes me defensive about my perspective. About my experience as an Irishwoman, an experience of the world not seen from within the nation with the world's biggest muscle. An experience characterised by being outside the standard Anglophone frames of reference.
