Table Of ContentTransforming Memories in
Contemporary Women’s Rewriting
Liedeke Plate
Transforming Memories in Contemporary
Women’s Rewriting
Also by Liedeke Plate:
STOF EN AS. DE NEERSLAG VAN 11 SEPTEMBER IN KUNST EN CULTUUR
(edited with Anneke Smelik)
TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY IN THE ARTS (edited with Anneke Smelik)
Transforming Memories
in Contemporary Women’s
Rewriting
Liedeke Plate
Assistant Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Palgrave
macmillan
© Liedeke Plate 2011
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For Eline and Louise
in memoriam Matei Calinescu
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Part I Consuming Memories 1
1 Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories:
Contemporary Women’s Rewriting and/as Cultural Memory 3
Contemporary women’s rewriting 5
Producing the past 9
Memory culture 12
The rise of ‘the past’ 13
Instant obsolescence 15
Manufacturing the past 17
Consuming memories 18
Post-Fordist literary marketplace 21
The presence of the past 24
A new historical culture 26
Myth as methodoloy 29
Tactics and strategies of memory 32
Performing cultural memory 34
Part II Fair Use 37
2 En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting,
and the Politics of Recognition 39
Rewriting as productive reception 41
Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ 45
‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture
féminine as rewriting 49
Author-izing women’s writing 54
Reader-oriented approaches and anti-authoritarianism 57
Production and consumption 61
3 Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC
of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright) 66
‘Literary theft’ as a metaphor to live, write, and die by 67
Stealing the language 70
The risk of rewriting 75
vii
viii Contents
Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary 78
Rewriting and brand management 83
Rewriting in the post-Fordist literary marketplace 89
Part III Cultural Scripts 95
4 Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’ to Silence 97
Silence and women’s (re)writing 100
Rewriting silence 106
The subject of ‘writing back’ 109
The ethics of rewriting 114
Towards a poetics of silence 120
5 High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting, and the Paradoxes
of Decanonization 130
Cultural capitalism 132
Supplementary rewritings of female tradition 138
Suspicion and after 144
Feminine versions: rewriting as a translation
into a (m)other tongue 148
The liveness of the canon: paradoxes of decanonization 154
Part IV Mythical Returns 157
6 Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing 159
Rewriting in times of ‘secondary orality’ 160
Performing memory 164
Mythical speech 168
Liquid mythologies 171
Remembering the future 174
Myth and memory 177
Multiperspectival memory 179
Notes 182
Bibliography 193
Index 214
Preface
This book proposes an assessment of contemporary women’s rewriting
from the 1970s to the present in the light of its engagement with cul-
tural memory. Women’s rewriting is defined as a genre in which narra-
tives of the past are retold from the perspective of a new, marginal, and
usually female character in the original story. Literally re-membering
and re-calling the old stories differently, contemporary women’s rewrit-
ing engages questions of remembrance and of forgetting in relation to
gendered identity.
Contemporary women’s rewriting emerged in a moment of history
particularly obsessed with memory. Cultural historians agree to locate
a shift in culture’s relationship to the past in the wake of the emanci-
patory movements of the 1960s. The new ‘memory culture’ developed
through the democratization of history and the attendant fragmenta-
tion of History into histories (and ‘herstories’). Viewed as interventions
in cultural memory seeking to generate helpful memories by changing
the way the past is remembered, women’s rewritings ostensibly form a
constituent part of the contemporary culture of memory. In this book,
I therefore ask: How did the literature inspired by the international
women’s movement transform cultural memory and, vice versa, how
did the memory culture that developed through the democratization
of history, in turn, affect the practice of women’s rewriting? By inquir-
ing into the mutually constitutive nature of contemporary women’s
rewriting and the ‘consumer memory culture’ that developed through
the democratization of history and the commoditization of the past,
this book explores women’s rewriting as integral to the dynamics of
contemporary cultural remembrance.
The book is divided in four parts. Part I, ‘Consuming Memories’, sets
the scene: it sketches the contours of the emergent new historical cul-
ture, places the concept of women’s rewriting in its historical context,
and elucidates the relationship between rewriting, cultural memory and
consumerism.
Part II, ‘Fair Use’, explores the specificity of women’s rewriting as
a h istorically situated literary genre, examining it as mode of literary
production that stands in a particular relation to contemporary debates
about gender, memory and the past. In this part, Chapter 2, ‘En/gendering
Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition’,
ix
x Preface
focuses on the emergence of concepts for women’s rewriting in the
1970s. Looking especially into Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and what
I term Hélène Cixous’s ‘récriture féminine’, the chapter situates rewriting
in the context of second-wave feminism and explores its relationship to
contemporary theories of reading, authorship, and of literary consump-
tion and production. Chapter 3, ‘Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC
of “Stolentelling” (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright)’, inquires into
the counter-memorial practice of women’s rewriting as the stealing of
language, particularly as it relates to other forms of literary theft. Taking
two notorious plagiarism cases of the 1990s as its focus – Pia Pera’s Diary
of Lo and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone – it examines the limits
copyright puts on what can be rewritten and demonstrates its ability
to impede the memory-work of rewriting as an intervention in cultural
memory.
Part III, ‘Cultural Scripts’, takes up some important issues contem-
porary women’s rewriting raises about silence, speech, forgetting and
remembering, canonization, and cultural identity. Chapter 4, ‘Untold
Stories: “Writing Back” to Silence’, looks into rewriting in relation to
silence and forgetting to address the vexed relationship of feminism
to postcolonialism. Focusing on what I see as contemporary women’s
rewriting’s metafictional moment, the chapter discusses J.M. Coetzee’s
Foe and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem as novels
reflecting on the possibilities rewriting offers for the articulation of alter/
native experiences. Chapter 5, ‘High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting,
and the Paradoxes of Decanonization’, explores the relation of women’s
rewriting to the past in the light of the canon. Comparing and contrast-
ing recent and older rewritings – Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, Sena Jeter
Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia on the one hand,
and Christa Wolf’s Kassandra and Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl on
the other – the chapter inquires into issues of canon formation, cultural
identity, and collective memory, identifying strategies of supplementa-
tion and reparation complementing women’s rewriting’s hermeneutics
of distrust.
In the final part, ‘Mythical Returns’, I proposes a re-assessment of
contemporary women’s rewriting in the light of myth. Chapter 6,
‘Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing’, begins by
situating contemporary women’s rewriting within the market culture of
inscription and of accumulation that is printed book culture. Focusing
on two of Jeanette Winterson’s recent novels – Weight and The Stone
Gods – it proceeds to explore mythical retelling as a means to engage
cultural continuity and change in transforming memory today.
