What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

by Shoshana Felman

Overview

'What does a woman want?'—the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte—is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801846205
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Shoshana Felman is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her many books include Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Jacques Lacan and the Adventures of Insight Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, and Writing and Madnes.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What Does a Women Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading
Chapter 2. Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy
Chapter 3. Textuality and the Riddle of Bisexuality
Chapter 4. Competing Pregnancies: The Dream from which Psychoanalysis Proceeds
Chapter 5. With Whom Do You Believe Your Lot is Cast? Woolfe, de Beauvoir, Rich and the Struggle for Autobiography
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Shoshana Felman is a reader of unparalleled subtlety.
—Marjorie Garber, Harvard University

Marjorie Garber

Shoshana Felman is a reader of unparalleled subtlety.

Editorial Reviews

Felman pries open, radically displaces, and reengenders this question, through literature . . . psychoanalysis . . . and women's autobiographical writing.
—Frances L. Restuccia, Novel

From the Publisher

Felman pries open, radically displaces, and reengenders this question, through literature... psychoanalysis... and women's autobiographical writing.

Novel - Frances L. Restuccia

Felman pries open, radically displaces, and reengenders this question, through literature... psychoanalysis... and women's autobiographical writing.

— Frances L. Restuccia

Novel

The question is what men ask when women resist their place in patriarchal society, but Felman (French and comparative literature, Yale U.) turns it into a question women ask themselves. She finds redefinitions of women in the autobiographical writings of Woolf, de Beauvoir, and Rich, and compares them to male encounters with the feminine other in Freud and Balzac. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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