Gender Ascendant
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Benjamin Bennett
About this book
Does feminist theory—the theoretical grasp of exactly how a patriarchal oppression of women operates and has operated in Western societies—arise simply as women’s response to the experience of oppression? Bennett argues that no such substantial current of thought ever arises in this manner, and that feminist theory is not truly grasped until we uncover in intellectual history the not-yet-feminist body of thought from which it emerges. He approaches this matter by discussing an anti-aesthetic tendency in the work of major eighteenth-century German authors, both male and female, a tendency which develops (he claims) in the direction of proto-feminism. Especially notable is the kind of feminist theory in question here, a theory which focuses uncompromisingly on the hardest possible problems it encounters: on a gender-based logic by which women writers, precisely in asserting themselves as women, run up against an imperative of silence; on the recognition that in a strictly ethical feminist view, gender difference is inaccessible to the understanding; and on the problem of a future for feminism in a world where the aesthetic approach to art and literature has apparently prevailed once and for all.
Author / Editor information
Professor Benjamin Bennett, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Dedication
V -
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Acknowledgments
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Contents
IX -
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Abbreviations
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A Note to Non-Readers of German
XIII -
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Premises and Disclaimers
1 -
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Introduction
13 -
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Chapter One Mighty Opposites Re-gendered: Lessing and Schiller
29 -
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Chapter Two Doubled Plays: Schiller and Kleist
55 -
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Chapter Three Charlotte von Stein: Allegories of Writing
79 -
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Chapter Four La Roche and Karsch: Writing without the Consequences
107 -
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Chapter Five Goethe’s Theory of Relativity: An Impossible Novel
141 -
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Chapter Six Doubled Writers: Bettina von Arnim and Her Günderode
173 -
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Chapter Seven Deep Reading and Gender: The Last Words of Faust
203 -
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Conclusion: The Futures of Feminism
227 -
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Bibliography
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Index
239
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