Comdedy and the Woman Writer

Woolf, Spark, and Feminism

By Judy Little

University of Nebraska Press, USA,1983  p224

R: 29,Mar, 2012

Chapter 1  Ritual as Revelution: Comedy and Women

Chapter 2 Virginia Woolf: Myth and Manner in the Early Novels

Chapter 3: The Politics of Holiday: Woolf’s Later Novels

Chapter 4: Muriel Spark: The Irrational Norm

Chapter 5: Muriel Spark: Takeovers

Chapter 6: Feminist Comedy

Preface

This book began with an idea of Virginia Woolf’s – that comedy written by women may be different from comedy written by men.

Chapter 1  Ritual(仪式；老规矩)as Revelution: Comedy and Women

Liminality describes a threshold (limen 开始), a transition, a borderline area or condition. Strictly speaking, the word applies to the middle portion of each “rite of passage” as described by Arnord van Gennep. Rites which accompany major transition in life-birth, initiation(启蒙), weddings, death – have a tripartite structure of separation from society, transtion or liminality, and finally reincorporation into society –p3

Further, the motif of the “woman on top”, politically and domestically, a motif frequen in festive celebrations and in popular iconography, may have encouraged wome to join in the riots of laborers in preindustrial Europe. Although the motif – a woman vigorously thrashing a knelling man, for instance – was supposed to symbolize a quite reprehensible anarchy, the very existence of the idea in popular art.  —p5-6

Woolf: “The capacity to criticize the other sex had its share in deciding women to write novels, for indeed that particular vein of comedy has been but slightly worked, and promises great richness.

Simone de Beauvoir had thoroughly examine this division of historical and mythological labor: the man is typically the hero, the subject, the representative of humanity, the winner and conqueror, while the woman is mother, backgroud, landscape, tempress, or goal. She is so much an outside that she is not human. She is “other;” she is “natural” or childlike or holy or evil, while the man is “man”.(hamanity)

Woolf, Spark, and Feminism

By Judy Little

University of Nebraska Press, USA,1983  p224

R: 29,Mar, 2012

Chapter 1  Ritual as Revelution: Comedy and Women

Chapter 2 Virginia Woolf: Myth and Manner in the Early Novels

Chapter 3: The Politics of Holiday: Woolf’s Later Novels

Chapter 4: Muriel Spark: The Irrational Norm

Chapter 5: Muriel Spark: Takeovers

Chapter 6: Feminist Comedy

Preface

This book began with an idea of Virginia Woolf’s – that comedy written by women may be different from comedy written by men.

Chapter 1  Ritual(仪式；老规矩)as Revelution: Comedy and Women

Liminality describes a threshold (limen 开始), a transition, a borderline area or condition. Strictly speaking, the word applies to the middle portion of each “rite of passage” as described by Arnord van Gennep. Rites which accompany major transition in life-birth, initiation(启蒙), weddings, death – have a tripartite structure of separation from society, transtion or liminality, and finally reincorporation into society –p3

Further, the motif of the “woman on top”, politically and domestically, a motif frequen in festive celebrations and in popular iconography, may have encouraged wome to join in the riots of laborers in preindustrial Europe. Although the motif – a woman vigorously thrashing a knelling man, for instance – was supposed to symbolize a quite reprehensible anarchy, the very existence of the idea in popular art.  —p5-6

Woolf: “The capacity to criticize the other sex had its share in deciding women to write novels, for indeed that particular vein of comedy has been but slightly worked, and promises great richness.

Simone de Beauvoir had thoroughly examine this division of historical and mythological labor: the man is typically the hero, the subject, the representative of humanity, the winner and conqueror, while the woman is mother, backgroud, landscape, tempress, or goal. She is so much an outside that she is not human. She is “other;” she is “natural” or childlike or holy or evil, while the man is “man”.(hamanity)

只看了第一章和最后一章，与我的研究关系不大。