BiblioVault - Books about 1919-2013

Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times
Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Library of Congress PR6023.E833Z615 2010 | Dewey Decimal 823.914

Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Timeswrestles with the ghosts that continue to haunt our most pressing twenty-first-century concerns: how to reconceive imprisoning conceptions of sexuality and gender, how to define terrorism, how to locate the personal, and how to write on race and colonialism in an ever-slippery postmodern world. This collection of essays clearly establishes Lessing’s importance as a unique and necessary voice in contemporary literature and life.

In tracing the evolution in Lessing’s representations of controversial subjects, this volume shows how new cultural and political contexts demand new solutions. Focusing on Lessing’s experiments with genre and on the ramifications of narrative itself, the collection asks readers to reformulate some of their most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and their relation to it.

Contributors to Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times assess Lessing’s vision of the past and its relevance for the future by revisiting texts from the beginning of her career onward while at the same time probing previous interpretations of these works. These reassessments reveal Lessing’s continued role as a gadfly who, in disrupting rigid constructions of right and wrong and of good and evil, forces her readers to move beyond “you are damned, we are saved” narratives. As rationales such as these continue to permeate global venues, Lessing’s oeuvre becomes increasingly relevant.

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Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival
Carey Kaplan
Ohio University Press, 1988
Library of Congress PR6023.E833Z62 1988 | Dewey Decimal 823.914

Long neglected by the academic world because of her rejection of belletristic values and resistance to convenient literary taxonomy, Doris Lessing has nonetheless built an international following of serious, dedicated readers. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by the multiple dimensions of Lessing’s work, Kaplan and Rose have gathered eleven essays that address her artistic, philosophical, political, and psychological complexity, and so provide a welcome introduction to the extraordinary depth and diversity of this important contemporary novelist.

Lessing has been described as an “alchemical” writer, in that her work is directed toward changing people’s lives and perceptions rather than simply recording experience. Accordingly, the contributors examine her various postures and tactics for the purpose of discovering how the alchemical elements inform her various personae. Frederick C. Stern discusses Lessing’s commitment to radical humanist thought, while Carey Kaplan examines how Lessing’s imperialist past has shaped her futuristic fiction. Elizabeth Abel offers a feminist interpretation of the pattern of brother-sister incest in Lessing’s work, showing how Lessing has established Antigone as a female alternative to the Oedipal myth of male incest. Particularly insightful is Eve Bertelsen’s report of her interview with Lessing, demonstrating how Lessing’s often evasive style of adversarial dialogue works in concert with her refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed by academic analysis.

For those readers new to her work, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival will serve as a useful introduction to Lessing’s concerns and techniques. Those who have long admired her writing will find in this collection new keys to understanding Lessing’s philosophical, political, and psychological complexity.

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Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change
Gayle Greene
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Library of Congress PR6023.E833Z68 1994 | Dewey Decimal 823.914

An original and compelling appraisal of this important international literary figure

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IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE: THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION
DEBORAH MARTINSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2003
Library of Congress PR908.M37 2003 | Dewey Decimal 828.9103099287

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.

In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.

Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

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