Intimate observers: American women writers in an ethnographic tradition.
Item
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Title
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Intimate observers: American women writers in an ethnographic tradition.
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Identifier
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AAI3083656
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identifier
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3083656
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Creator
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Engber, Kimberly S.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Anthropology, Cultural | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on the writing of early women ethnographers, a category I define somewhat broadly as including fiction writers and anthropologists. Using the work of feminist literary scholars as a preliminary model, I argue that fictions and personal narratives by American women of the nineteenth century should be read---as travel narratives and the monumental, individualistic quest novels of Defoe and Conrad have been---as precursors to modern ethnographies. I first examine texts published in the late 1830s and 1840s as a mass visual culture is emerging in Europe and America, and I argue that these texts register the related emergence of what I am calling a "naive ethnographer" in narrative. After establishing an analogy between narrative perspectives in fiction and anthropology, I devote the larger part of the dissertation to reading modern ethnography and modernist fiction as genres with some distinct functions but with common origins in the nineteenth century. I suggest that women writers who were seemingly confined to writing intimately about the domestic consciously extend the boundaries of this sphere. A number of women writers claimed authority from their experience as participant observers within American culture and abroad in order to defamiliarize American domestic and sexual practices.;I began this dissertation research in order to understand recent contentious discussions about ethnography and literary analysis. I wanted to ground these controversies by considering more carefully the relationships among ethnography, fiction, and the real world of their readers. More particularly, in response to theorists who initially refused to understand classic ethnographies by women as experimental in form, I wanted to use literary analysis to show how women ethnographers have been influenced directly by experimental modernist fiction. Ultimately, I question the use of the term "experimental" simply to designate the incorporation of literary style and sensibility into ethnographic monographs. It has become clear to me that ethnography developed at least in part out of fiction and other literary forms, and it has also become clear that women contributed greatly to the development of ethnography as a method of recording and---in some ways more significantly---of critiquing cultures in the twentieth century.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
