(FaceToFace workshop - Teacher: Gloria Fortún) CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS And so all good things must end. The workshop finished this Saturday with this selection of a chosen few contemporary women writers brought to us by Gloria.
Thank you for attending, and thank you Gloria for doing a splendid job. We hope you'll find the time to visit their websites and hopefully read some of their books.
The daughter of a Jamaican mother and English father, Smith is married to Northern Irish poet and writer, Nick Laird.
As well as being Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, she is the author of three novels—White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and On Beauty. She has also published a volume of essays: Changing my Mind.
White Teeth was completed during her final year at Cambridge University. Several publishing companies had bid for the rights before the manuscript was even complete and the novel went on to win numerous awards. The novel depicts the lives of people with a wide range of backgrounds, including Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and Jewish, set in the multi-cultural suburbs of North London .
Arundhati is an Indian writer who writes in English and a committed activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality.
She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays and non-fiction books.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
The New York Times called her "India's most impassioned critic of globalization".
When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less. (The God of Small Things Ammu, Chapter 4: Abhilash Talkies.
Although you can read her biography on the website, we will comment on the fact that Susanna worked as an EFL teacher for two years, first in Turin and later in Bilbao, where she first got the idea for "Jonathan Strange and Mr.Norrell" (Booker Prize 2004, Whitbread Prize 2004, Nebula 2006 among other prizes and awards).
Clarke was born on 1 November 1959 in Nottingham, England, and spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland, and enjoyed reading the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and, Jane Austen.
In 2006, Clarke published a collection of eight fairy tales presented as the work of several different writers: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. The collection is a "sly, frequently comical, feminist revision" of Jonathan Strange.
She has published several volumes of short stories and many are includedin fantasy and science fiction anthologies.
Azar was born in Iran under the rule of the Shah. She was sent to England at the age of 13, to study
Azar Nafisi is a professor at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. She attended The University of Oklahoma and later Oxford University and taught literature at three Iranian universities, including the University of Tehran, from which she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil. Azar Nafisi left Iran with her family in 1997,
and moved to the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a book where she describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The book is translated into 12 languages. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."
From 1995 to 1997, before she left Iran, Azar Nafisi met with seven students every Thursday to discuss literature. Reading Lolita in Tehran is the memoir of that experience, where the conversations ranged from Jane Austen to Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov.
You can find her biography and works on her website, that features this quote by Barbara on the home page:
"Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself."
She is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the former Republic of Congo in her early childhood.
Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Starting in April 2005, Kingsolver and her family spent a year eating only what was produced locally as possible. Living on their farm in rural Virginia, they grew much of their own food, and obtained most of the rest from their neighbors and other local farmers. Kingsolver, her husband, and her elder daughter chronicled their experiences that year in the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. You can read a review on this book and her very interesting experience with organic gardening here.
You can find her biography and lots of photos on her website.
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer who explores mother-daughter relationships in many of her writings. She was born to Chinese immigrant parents living in the US and later learned that her mother had left behind in China an abusive husband and three children. She travelled to China and met her half-sisters.
The Kitchen God's Wife,The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter (of which she wrote a libretto for the San Francisco Opera), and Saving Fish from Drowning were New York Times bestsellers. So was her first book, The Joy Luck Club (1989)thatwastranslated into 35 languages and became a highly successful film.
And her wonderful blog full of photos and fun: http://marg09.wordpress.com/
Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, writer of children's stories and environmental activist.
She was the winner of the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, (The Handmaid's Tale) to the best science fiction novel in the UK - Margaret preferred to refer to it as "speculative fiction" and finally accepted the designation of "social science fiction." in which she also includes Oryx and Crake. She was honoured with the Príncipe de Asturias award for Literature in 2008. There is a version in Spanish of her speech on receiving the prize here.
She is involved in politics and holds strong environmental views. She is a member, with her partner, of the Green Party of Canada.
The Cat's Eye,Surfacing, The Edible Woman, The Blind Assassin are only a few of her books we highly recommend.
Her biography and a list of her works can be found on her website.
Joyce Carol Oates writes short stories, children stories, poetry and non fiction, and has published over 50 novels. She was derided on this account by some critics in the 80's, but her achievements are know widely acclaimed.
Between 1968 and 1978, Oates published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career. Teaching and writing are two activities she finds perfectly compatible.
With her first husband Raymond Smith, she founded The Ontario Review (1974), a literary magazine and the independent publishing house, Ontario Review Books (1980).
I'll take you there, Black Water and Blonde are highly recommended.
Novelist, playwright (Dreaming Emmett) editor and professor, she was awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize (her citation says: "she gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."). She is the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize. She has played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream.
The Bluest Eye and Beloved are probably her best known books.
From The Bluest Eye (written while raising two children and teaching) :
"Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her."
In this video, she talks of her beginnings as a writer and about the subject matter of The Bluest Eye.
Her website includes a biography, list of her works and tons of interesting information. (There is also a page in Spanish)
Writer of novels, poetry, children's books, essays and short stories and screenplays, especially in the genre of fantasy and science fiction. Her works explore Taoist, feminist, physchological and sociological themes.
In her essay "The Carrier-Bag Theory of
Fiction" (1988 ) she suggests that there are two major forms of fiction :
"the hunter-hero story , which is progressive and linear , involves killing large animals or enemies or overcoming one large but surmountable
problem , and produces a hero ... or the life-story or "carrier bag " type , involves one or more people carrying on and containing or preserving whatever is valued for the current work and for the future . The characters support each others' efforts , or cooperate , and the progress is more web-like than linear." You can read the whole essay here.
In this video, she reads a chapter of her book "Lavinia".
SAPPHIC VOICES
At the beginning of the 20th century, ambiguous expression and the use of pseudonyms were just two of the subtle devices adopted by women writers to disguise their lesbian identity or that of their characters. Any notion of the existence of lesbianism was suppressed by publishers, while literary critics freely practised condemnation of lesbian writers. These are only a few of the women who managed to break down the barriers of invisibility, seen from three different perspectives: 1) topic: the content of the work is openly lesbian or lesbian related 2) writer: the writer is/was a lesbian 3) reader: the work, although not explicitly sapphic and often ambiguous, carries a subtext that is easily identified by readers. Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey)
1865 - 1960
Born in the midst of an exceptional family, all ten Strachey children grew up in a period of great change (Victorian England on the way to the beat generation) and excelled in one field or another, openly defending, in the nineteenth century, feminism, the suffrage movement, and making a stand for women's education. Dorothy is the sister of Lytton and Julia Strachey, both part of the Bloomsbury group. Dorothy was bisexual. She fell madly in love with her headmistress at Allenswood Academy, Marie Souvestre, a noted feminist who greatly influenced Eleanor Roosevelt (who also studied there at the time). Dorothy was later involved with Lady Ottoline Morrell. In 1903, she married Simon Bussy, a French painter with whom she had a daughter. She moved to the south of France where she befriended Matisse and translated much of Andre Gide's (whom she admired) work. When Olivia appeared, its authorship was unknown. It was published as "Olivia, by Olivia" when Dorothy was 83 years old! The book is an account of her school love at the age of sixteen. She writes bravely in the introduction: "I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead..." This is the first part of the beautiful film made from the book. The script was written by Colette. It is in French, with English subtitles and you can watch the whole film (9 parts) in Youtube.
Amy Lowell
1874 - 1925
Amy was born in Massachusetts, U.S. in a prominent Episcopalian family. She was an avid reader and a socialite who travelled widely. She was the lover of Mercedes Acosta before embarking on a lifelong relationship with actress Ada Russell, who was to become the subject of many of her poems. (Two Speak Together) Her relationship with Russell, coupled with her unconventional habits of wearing men’s clothing and smoking cigars, led her poetry to be dismissed by critics who were uncomfortable with her homosexual and eccentric lifestyle. She was deeply interested in, and influenced by, the Imagist movement (Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle: HD, Ford Maddox Ford) that believed that "concentration is of the very essence of poetry" and strove to "produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite." She moved on later to explore the use of "polypohonic prose", mixing formal verse and free forms. She was also interested in Chinese and Japanese poetry. She had a lifelong love for Keats, of whom she said: "The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius." She wrote his biography that was published one year after her death: in 1925, the same year in which she was awarded the Pullitzer Prize for her collection of poems What's a Clock.
Radclyffe Hall
1880 - 1943
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and novelist born in Bournemouth, Dorset. She was the only child of an unhappy marriage. Her mother Marie Diehl, an American widow married her extravagant father who left her months before Marguerite was born. She studied at King's College and later in Germany, where she met Mabel Batten, with whom she was involved until Mabel's death in 1916. Mabel called her "John, a name she adopted the rest of her life. In 1917 she began a love affair with the sculptor Una Troubridge that lasted until Radclyffe-Hall's death in 1943. Radclyffe-Hall is the author of many books, some comedies, and Adam's Breed, that was critically acclaimed and earned her two prizes, andThe Well of Loneliness, regarded by most as the first lesbian novel and her most important book. It contains no erotic passages; it is a simple plea for tolerance. Even though it was not openly explicit, in 1928, the book was judged by the British courts to be obscene. Many important writers who were asked to defend the book excused themselves "for reasons you might guess", Virginia Woolf wrote "though they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father or a cousin who is about to have twins."
The Well of Loneliness conforms to the stereotypical image in literature of the misery of lesbian existence, with the main character being left alone at the end because her lover is driven back into the arms of a man. Yet whatever its limitations for contemporary readers, Hall was a pioneer in her courageous defiance of silence.
Lillian Hellman
1905 - 1984
After working as a book reviewer, press agent, and play reader, she began writing plays in the 1930s. Her first major success, The Children's Hour (1934), concerned two schoolteachers falsely accused of lesbianism. She examined family infighting in her hit The Little Foxes (1939) and political injustice in Watch on the Rhine (1941). All were made into successful films. She was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. This committee persecuted actors, painters and writers who sympathized with left wing causes. After working as a book reviewer, press agent, and play reader, she began writing plays in the 1930s. Her first major success, The Children's Hour (1934), concerned two schoolteachers falsely accused of lesbianism. She examined family infighting in her hit The Little Foxes (1939) and political injustice in Watch on the Rhine (1941). All were made into successful films. Lillian was also a close friend of Dorothy Parker. She wrote several memoirs and edited the works of her longtime companion, the novelist Dashiell Hammett.
Kay Ryan
1945
Ryan was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Since 1971, Ryan has lived in Marin County. Her partner of 30 years is Carol Adair. For more than 30 years, Ryan limited her professional responsibilities to part-time teaching. Ryan has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader: "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way." She is the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States 2008-2009 (first lesbian poet) and has received numerous awards. Her poems have been widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hide and Seek It’s hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It’s hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It’s like some form of skin’s developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear.Kay Ryan
Julie Anne Peters
1952
Born in Jamestown, New York, but moved when she was five to Colorado. She is a writer of books for children and young adults. Her books for young adults include Define "Normal" (2000), Keeping You a Secret (2003), Luna (2004), Far from Xanadu (2005), and Between Mom and Jo (2006). Her young adult fiction frequently deals with LGBT issues. She has also written books for younger readers, such as the Snob Squad series. Her website: http://www.julieannepeters.com/
Carol Ann Duffy 1955 Carol Ann Duffy, (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly bisexual person to hold the position, as well as the first laureate to be chosen in the 21st century.
Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female NudeSelling Manhattan (1987) The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), and RaptureNew & Collected Poems for Children.
She also writes picture books for children and has been awarded numerous prizes.
Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play.
Carol Ann Duffy - Last PostCargado por poetictouch. - Descubre más videos creativos.GOTHIC NOVELISTS Gothic fiction (18th century and 19th centuries), rooted in Romanticism, was born as a "genre" with Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto". Ghosts, supernatural events, haunted houses, terror, extreme emotions, mystery and fantasy all contribute to the "atmosphere" that was embraced by many women writers. Gothic novels aside from evoking terror in their readers also served to show the dark side of human nature. Some of the authors Gloria talked to us about:
Anne Radcliffe 1764 - 1823 Born as Ann Ward in Holborn, UK, she married a journalist and had no children. She began writing fiction under the name of Anne Radcliffe around 1790. Her blend of moralism, aesthetics and drama struck a chord with the readers of the time, becoming a hugely popular writer. She was also a pioneer, being one of the first writers to make fictional use of landscape, placing her characters in constructed environments and employing vivid contrasts and chiaroscuro effects in the settings of her plots. She seemed to have invented the technique of proto-cinematic — or narrative description called word-painting. "On the edge of tremendous precipices, and within the hollow of the cliffs, below which the clouds often floated, were seen villages, spires, and convent towers; while green pastures and vineyards spread their hues at the feet of perpendicular rocks of marble, or of granite, whose points, tufted with alpine shrubs, or exhibiting only massy crags, rose above each other, till they terminated in the snow-topt mountain, whence the torrent fell, that thundered along the valley. . . " Her characters are often allowed to become secondary to the natural world around them, rendering mankind insignificant in comparison to the beauty, splendor, and power of Nature (Romantic influence) The Mysteries of Udolpho is an essential Gothic text, and together with The Italian and The Romance of the Green Forest, considered to be her most representative work. Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, are only a few of the authors that are said to have been influenced by Anne Radcliffe's writing.
Jane Austen 1775-1817 One of the most loved and respected English women writers of all times, there is so much information about her available on and off line, that we will resort to the video below as a summary of her life and works. Northanger Abbey , her first book, was written between 1798–1799 in Austen's home in Hampshire, UK. It was sold to a publisher in 1803 but not published. Later, after her success with other novels, she bought back the manuscript and revised it slightly. Northanger Abbey was published after her death, in 1817. Written at the end of the 18th century, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre, satirizing the conventions and form of the Gothic novels. The second part, set in Northanger Abbey, a large stone building that was formerly a church, is converted into the Tilney's home. Catherine Tilney, the main character, reads The Mysteries of Udolpho (by Anne Radcliffe - see below) during her time at Bath, before moving to Northanger, and it is implied that she has read similar novels before. Isabella has a library of other Gothic novels that the women plan to read once Catherine has finished Udolpho. Gothic novels and their conventions occur throughout the novel. "Perhaps, after all, it is possible to read too many novels", says Henry TilneyBIOGRAPHY & WORKS
Mary Shelley 1797 - 1851 Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in Great Britain, daughter to philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died on giving birth to her, and the political philosopher William Godwin. When she was 16, she ran off to continental Europe with Romantic poet Percy Shelley, who was married at the time. Novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer and travel writer, she is best know for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) It was during another trip to Switzerland with Byron and Polidory, that Mary was to write Frankenstein, the only story of the four written as result of a contest between the friends, that was ever to be published as a novel (1818/1822). See video below. In spite of bein considered a science-fiction novel, there are many gothic ingredients in Frankenstein. For example, the use of nature to create atmosphere: The bleak, glacial fields of the Alps and the mists of the Arctic serve to indicate the isolation of the two protagonists or the solitary character that can apply to both Victor and his creation, since they both live their lives in social isolation. Percy's wife drowned herself shortly after Mary and Percy returned from Italy (Percy and Mary would then marry, in December 1816), and in later years, the death of her half sister and of two of her own children led her to a depression, in spite of the birth of an only surviving son. After tragic drowning of Percy Shelley in a sailing trip in Italy in 1822. she continued writing (The Last Man) and published and promoted Shelley's work. She was 53 when she died.
Painted by Evert A. Duyckinick
Charlotte Brontë1866 - 1855 Charlotte was born in Thornton, England. She was the third of six children born to Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë . When Maria died in 1821, the five sisters and their brother were put under the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Charlotte was sent off with three of her sisters to the Clergy Daughters' School in Lancashire, where the poor conditions would permanently affect her health and contribute to the early death of her two elder sisters. Their father took them back home to Hawthorne Parsonage, where Charlotte and the surviving children, Branwell, Anne and Emily grew up in the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal, a life chronicled in sagas, articles and poems they wrote. She worked as a governess and a teacher, and published her first novella (The Green Dwarf) under the name of Wellesley. In May 1846, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published a joint collection of poetry under the assumed names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte used "Currer Bell" when she published her first two novels. ..."Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called 'feminine' -- we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.Jane Eyre is a powerful study of being, identity, autonomy, gender, passion, power — all these and more. Undoubtedly one of the major novels of British literature, it's a vital link in the Gothic's evolution away from an exterior, often horror-based aesthetic to a more internal, emotion- and psychology-based aesthetic. Yet it retains enough Gothic traces to be quite recognizable as a direct descendant: the isolated building, the pursued young heroine, the darkly Byronic hero. It was not until after the big success of Jane Eyre, that she began to sign her writings with her name and frequent the company of other writers, like Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell. Charlotte became engaged to Rev. A.B. Nicholls, curate of Haworth, whom she later married. She had rejected him previously and it seems clear that although she admired him, she did not love him. In 1854 Charlotte, expecting a child, caught pneumonia and after a lengthy and painful illness, she died, probably of dehydration. FaceToFace offers a workshop on Jane Eyre on demand. (4Friends)
Emily Brontë 1818 - 1848 Novelist and poet, Emily was born in Thornton, England, She was the fifth of the six Brontë children. The family later moved to Haworth, west Yorkshire, where the father was perpetual curate (1824) and where she was to spend most of her time and write all her works She travelled to Brussels with Charlotte with the intention of perfecting her German and French, but grew homesick and returned to Haworth, where she kept on writing and collected and organized all her poems. On discovering them, Charlotte insisted on publishing them In May 1846, Emily, Charlotte and Anne published a collection of poetry that sold only two copies. (see above) The poems within it, and others collected later, have now achieved classic literary status. Virginia Woolf believed that Emily's poetry would outlive her more famous novel. She published under the pen name of Ellis Bell. Emily published the first two volumes of Wuthering Heights in 1847 (It was meant to be published in three volumes (the last volume being Agnes Grey by her sister Anne). Its innovative structure puzzled critics. It received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion. She caught a cold during the funeral of her brother in September 1848. Refusing medical help, she died on 19 December 1848. In 1850, Charlotte edited and published Wuthering Heights as a stand-alone novel under Emily's real name. The book is now an English literary classic.
Zadie Smith (UK, 1975)
Ursula K. le Guin (U.S. 1929)
Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey)
Kay Ryan
