Sponsored by The Rosenbach Literature Program Fund.
Registration
- This is a FREE virtual program held on Zoom. Please check your spam folder for the Zoom link.
- If you have questions about registration, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [email protected].
- Registration opens for Delancey Society members on August 4, for members on August 6, and for the general public on August 9.
Description
A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women’s movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it.
From its stirrings in the midcentury—when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion—to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.
As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains—including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality—they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.
About the Speakers
Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished literary critic, poet, and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis. The author, most recently, of Judgment Day: Poems, she lives in Berkeley, California.
Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist, literary critic, and professor emerita at Indiana University. The author, most recently, of Late-Life Love: A Memoir, she lives in Bloomington, Indiana. Gubar is the co-author, with Sandra M. Gilbert, of The Madwoman in the Attic, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, among other volumes. In 2012, they were awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle.
Judith Newman is the author of the bestseller To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: The Diary of a New (Older) Mother, a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and a magazine writer covering entertainment, science, business, beauty, health, and popular culture.
Join the Conversation
A series of informal, intimate talks given by literary and cultural luminaries, In Conversation With The Rosenbach delves into fascinating histories, intellectual curiosities, and inspiring ideas. Each program offers audience members a chance to join the conversation after the talk and share their own thoughts and questions.
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