Language experiment: Science, gender, and discourse in the works of Margaret Fuller.
Item
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Title
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Language experiment: Science, gender, and discourse in the works of Margaret Fuller.
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Identifier
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AAI9830719
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identifier
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9830719
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Creator
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Haronian, Mary-Jo.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1998
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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 | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the impact of scientific thought on Fuller's politics and poetics, uncovering aspects of her work invisible without this context. Fuller's attention to the ideological framing of knowledge, which science elicited by its very denial of such a bias, led her to reconsider how "knowledge" is formed and transformed through description, authoritative statement, and rhetorical manipulation.;As Fuller weaves terms from electricity, optics, botany, and other sciences into her text, she demonstrates and exploits the mutability of these terms to open up the possibilities of new definitions of the natural and social phenomena science purports to describe. This in turn leads to a redefinition of language itself, which becomes a vehicle for social change. Her unraveling of gender terms such as "woman," "feminine," and "manly," for example, coincides with her attention to the changing meanings of the terms used to describe electrical energy. Given her nearly complete deconstruction of the definitions of "energy" and of "woman," her claim that women possess more "electrical" force than men do enacts a critique not only of science and of gender paradigms, but of a society built on the assumption of stable categories. Once she has toppled this assumption, and conceived a model of discourse in which meaning is constructed through dialogic contest, scientific theories can be pressed into service for her own ends. Her text projects into relief, against the background of dominant social mores, the discursive elements that regulate not only gender, but also race, in the cases of Native Americans and American slaves, and class, in the cases of frontier settlers and laborers in America and Europe.;The manipulation of scientific concepts becomes a revolutionary strategy throughout Fuller's work; when noted as well in the works of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, writers sharing Fuller's concern with definitions of gender and subjectivity, it indicates a feminist exploitation of authoritative epistemological claims and abstractions usually cast as patriarchal practice.
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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.
