Thinking through the body

Author: Yang Lixin Gallup
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: For Gallup, these articles all revolve around a central, urgent question: How can one become a female intellectual? Gallup has created a continuously fluctuating, vibrant area of uncertainty. This book is dynamic and worth reading, perhaps having more diverse readers than Gallup himself imagined. — Women's Review
Gallup never shuts herself off or pretends to be mysterious, as a writer can be self-aware. Her excellent reflections on her own articles, their presentation, and her own voice and body in this era are both outrageous and commendable, exceptionally interesting yet fundamentally serious. — Mary Ann Caws, City University of New York
Jane Gallup teaches Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Theory in the Modern Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has also written Reading Lacan, The Daughter's Temptation: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, and Crossings: Reading Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. Thinking Through the Body is a powerful work by Jane Gallup, a highly influential feminist literary critic and theorist in the United States today. It includes several representative essays published by the author between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, deeply expressing her thoughts on issues such as women, the body, desire, language, literature, and politics.
From multiple perspectives, the author offers a fresh approach to the body as a field of knowledge. She explores the relationship between the French writer Marquis de Sade and his mother from both personal experience and fictional scenes. Standing from a female perspective, she analyzes Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text, Sherry Ortner's Ortner Report, and Louise Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, among other influential literary and social science research texts in contemporary Western thought. She reflects on the inherent dilemmas of women's writing and uniquely discusses Freud's works as literary texts.