Feminism, Literary Theory, General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism

Getting Personal

Name: Getting Personal
Author: Nancy K. Miller
ISBN: 9780415903240

by Nancy K. Miller

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Overview

In the era of identity politics, whose is the "I" of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life.
Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing "as a" feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature.
Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.

About the Author, Nancy K. Miller

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and Lehman College. She is the author of Changing the Subject (1988), The Heroine's Text (1982), and editor of The Poetics of Gender (1986), as well as the author of numerous critical essays on gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and on French literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

What does it mean to speak as a feminist? How does the assumption of that role intersect with one's life history? These two questions are at the heart of Miller's Changing the Subject new collection of essays and occasional pieces, mainly engendered by ``the spectacle of a significant number of critics getting personal in their writing . . . a sign of a turning point in the history of critical practices.'' The writings that ensue are, for the most part, an engaging reply to the anti-feminist backlash in the academy and the ongoing war over the place of critical theory. Miller asks, ``Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice?'' She manages to balance the two here; most of the works are accessible to the general reader. The piece on why she gave up teaching French is very funny and will strike a responsive chord in many ex-Francophiles. Miller is particularly eloquent when addressing the question of what feminist scholars ``need to master'' to survive in the patriarchal institutions of the academy, concluding with an acknowledgment of the contradiction inherent in considering the impact of a writer's gender in an era that proclaims ``the Death of the Author.''p. 47 July