Comments | tea_drinker77: Dorothy Allison on Feminist Literature

tea_drinker77

Dorothy Allison on Feminist Literature

Jul 30, 2012 19:57

"When feminism exploded into my life, it gave me a vision of the world totally different from everything I had assumed or hoped. The concept of a feminist literature offered the possibility of pride in my sexuality. It saved me from either giving up writing entirely, or the worse prospect of writing lies in order to achieve some measure of grudging ( Read more... )

feminism, women's writing, lesbian literature, dorothy allison

Comments 8

burningmarl July 30 2012, 20:52:13 UTC

Your icon is lovely. It reminds me of when I "discovered" how the canon is basically a white male club and told my (white, male) English teacher like I'd discovered the secret of the universe and he was like "...yeah"

tea_drinker77 August 4 2012, 15:21:14 UTC

Ha ha! I remember my students going through that. The first seminar I used to do with them was on 'The Canon'. I'd give them extracts from a wide range of anonymised literary texts and ask them to decide which ones would be considered 'canonical' and why.

angiedub July 30 2012, 21:48:04 UTC

Ooh! Sounds like a book I need to read. I'm stuck in my writing too. Some of the same reasons. I've read a couple of her books. Allison really strikes a chord with me. Bastard out of Carolina and Cavedweller were tremendous books for me. I think I need to re-read them.

tea_drinker77 August 4 2012, 15:18:26 UTC

I would highly recommend this collection - it's really excellent. There are a couple of essays in there about writing that may be helpful to you.

angiedub August 5 2012, 07:07:02 UTC

I think it's funny, I read some of the reviews people wrote of her books and there were comments like "So much embellishment in Allison's memoirs that I'm not sure how much of it I should believe". As if she'd written gospel and not a novel. Though she admits that her novels are somewhat autobiographical, nowhere does she claim that they are memoirs.

I guess the commenter missed the words on the cover that state "A novel". But I suppose when such a story is written that one of the first questions people are bound to ask is "How much of it is true?"

tea_drinker77 August 5 2012, 19:18:29 UTC

That is a strange comment, but also rather telling. I think it's interesting that this kind of criticism usually gets leveled at women writers.

Do critics tend to ask these questions about On The Road or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which are works of fiction based on real lived experience?

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