Women's Language: An Analysis of Style and Expression in Letters Before 1800 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9187121875 ISBN 13: 9789187121876

Verlag: Nordic Academic Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

By linguistic close-reading of more than a thousand letters from the 12th through the 18th centuries—written in Latin, Swedish, French, German, and English—this compilation analyzes the differences in language and communication between women and men. Armed with an exhaustive stylistic analysis, this volume attempts to answer the question Is there a special niche reserved for women’s language? As it pinpoints the variations in how women expressed themselves when addressing men or other women, this detailed investigation of style and expression comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence for a particular female language; however, this authoritative work is a joy to follow for anyone interested in language, linguistics, stylistic analysis, and gender.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eva Haettner Aurelius is a professor in comparative literature at Lund University in Sweden. Hedda Gunneng is an associate professor in Medieval Latin at Gotland University in Sweden. Jon Helgason is an editor of the dictionary from the Swedish Academy and a researcher in comparative literature at Lund University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Women's Language

An Analysis of Style and Expression in Letters Before 1800

By Eva Hættner Aurelius, Hedda Gunneng, Jon Helgason, Lena Olsson

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2012 Nordic Academic Press and the authors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-91-87121-87-6

Contents

Introduction Eva Hættner Aurelius, Hedda Gunneng & Jon Helgason, 
1. Theoretical foundation Eva Hættner Aurelius, 
2. Linguistic stylistics — methodological considerations Hedda Gunneng & Börje Westlund, 
3. Medieval letters in Latin Hedda Gunneng, 
4. Swedish letters c. 1700–1740 and c. 1740–1800 Marie Löwendahl & Börje Westlund, 
5. Letters in French in the eighteenth century Elisabet Hammar, 
6. English letters from the long eighteenth century Lena Olsson, 
7. German letters in the eighteenth century Jon Helgason, 
8. Project summary and conclusions Hedda Gunneng, 
Appendix 1. Tables and diagrams, 
Appendix 2. Statistical analysis and hypothesis testing & statistical result tables, 
Appendix 3. Register of letters, 
About the authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Theoretical foundation

Eva Hættner Aurelius

In essence, feminist literary scholarship can be divided into three separate approaches: first, what Elaine Showalter has called 'the feminist critique', which examines lacunae and errors in the history of literature and stereotypical literary images of women; second, gynocriticism, which brings to the fore women's texts and sets out to describe potentially distinctive feminine characteristics in the texts and in culture alike; and thirdly, deconstruction, which questions 'woman' and 'feminine' as analytical concepts, and instead suggests that they are in fact social constructions, produced by dichotomies ('woman'/'feminine' is produced as the opposite to 'man'/'masculine') that always represent 'woman' as a deviation from the norm ('man'). 'Woman' and 'feminine' become problems that not only have to be corrected, but also consolidate the dominant position of 'the masculine'. Dichotomous thinking can, in addition, result in actual, individual women being locked into stereotypical gender roles and/or heterosexual identities. What feminist research should do is question this dichotomy in various ways, and show how the social construction of 'woman' is produced. Simply put, these three main approaches can be fitted into a chronological perspective: the feminist critique belongs to the 1960s and 1970s, gynocriticism to the 1980s, and deconstruction to the end of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Our investigation takes as its point of departure a critical theory that was first presented by Elaine Showalter in the well-known article 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', originally published in 1981 in Critical Inquiry. Her main purpose was to formulate a theory of women's writing or women's culture and its special characteristics: Showalter claimed that, until that point, Anglo-American research into women's literature had been theoretically naïve. Influenced by such feminist theorists as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, among others, Showalter attempted to formulate a comprehensive theory of women's writing. The term 'gynocriticism' is, in fact, Showalter's own, coined to differentiate the feminist critique, which focuses on the reader and the history of literature, from gynocriticism, which focuses on the female author.

In 1981, Showalter analysed the state of research about women's literature — Anglo-American feminist research dealing with women's writing, that is — and concluded that while women's texts had begun to be examined, scholars did not have any way of defining what it was they were investigating. Showalter continued: 'It is no longer the ideological dilemma of reconciling revisionary pluralisms but the essential question of difference. How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the difference of women's writing?' One of the reasons for Showalter's theoretical concern was the fact that during the 1970s a number of scholars in the US and the UK had written histories of women's literature without theoretically clarifying the subject of their histories. A similar objection can, incidentally, be made about the multi-volume Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria ('History of Nordic Women's Literature', (1993–2000) and the project that preceded it.

Showalter identifies four theoretical models of differentiating 'female/ feminine' or 'woman' from 'male/masculine' and 'man': biological, linguistic, psychoanalytical, and cultural. The biological theory bases difference in the uniqueness of the female body and in women's bodily experiences; the linguistic, in the assumption or hypothesis that women and men use language in different ways; the psychoanalytical, in the assumption that there are fundamental differences in the psychology of men and women as described by the psychoanalytical tradition. The differing psychosexual development of women compared to that of men has left women with a different relationship to language, creativity, imagination, and culture. Showalter herself is a proponent of the fourth or cultural theory, which is distinctly anthropological. This is because it is capable of incorporating all of the other theories:

A theory based on a model of women's culture can provide, I believe, a more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity and difference of women's writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or psychoanalysis. Indeed, a theory of culture incorporates ideas about women's body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to the social contexts in which they occur. The ways in which women conceptualize their bodies and their sexual and reproductive functions are intricately linked to their cultural environments. The female psyche can be studied as the product or construction of cultural forces. Language, too, comes back into the picture, as we consider the social dimensions and determinants of language use, the shaping of linguistic behaviour by cultural ideals. A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space.

It is clear that Showalter on the one hand perceives 'woman' and 'feminine' as cultural products, or 'constructions', but that on the other hand she also sees 'woman' and 'feminine' as universals. Because women in different cultures and in different periods share the same experiences, it is reasonable to use concepts like 'woman' and 'feminine'. The question is whether or not this constitutes essentialism (in other words, whether it is a purely ideological concept, produced by the man/woman dichotomy). Strictly speaking, it does not. Referring to anthropological theories and research, Showalter points out that the important thing is to empirically test the theory of a separate women's culture.

Showalter's concept of culture is an anthropological one: culture equals values, norms, actions, roles, behaviour, and social institutions. When investigating whether or not the concept of a separate female culture is a meaningful one, it is important to point out that such a culture must be one that is defined and maintained by women themselves, not one that society (in other words,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Nordic Academic Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 9187121875
• ISBN 13: 9789187121876
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Herausgeber: Aurelius Eva Haettner, Gunneng Hedda, Helgason Jon
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar