Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Sheila Hassell Hughes

NAME:
- Sheila Hassell Hughes

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Rebecca S. Chopp

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Walter Kalaidjian
- David Jasper

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Bridging Bodies of Work: The Poetic and the Prophetic in Women's Literature and Feminist Theology

Abstract: Since Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father, women's literature has provided feminist and womanist (or black feminist) theologies with alternative "sacred texts," or sources of prophetic discourse, and with poetic models for newly constructive methods. Integrating hermeneutical, rhetorical, and poetic approaches, this dissertation asks two questions: "What makes women's literature 'prophetic' in postmodern American society?"; and "How can we ethically read across lines of socio-cultural difference?" Method and ethics are twin foci of this project, which integrates discourses from feminist and multicultural literary theory and criticism, poststructuralist theory, cultural studies, and liberation theology.

Part One establishes working definitions for the terms "poetic" and "prophetic" and analyses the current uses of women's literature by feminist and womanist theologians. Specific intertextual instances are considered (poems by Audre Lorde in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza; Adrienne Rich in Elizabeth Johnson; and Marge Piercy in Rebecca Chopp). Because differences are too often occluded in reading across lines of race, class, sexuality, and culture, I argue for a feminist ethic of reading which is simultaneously imaginative and constructive (poetic), (self-) critically interpretive (hermeneutic), and attentive to issues of socio-cultural location (rhetorical).

Part Two brings this approach to extended readings of "prophetic" texts by twentieth-century American women writers. I compare H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall (1944) to Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca" (1968), as epic poems set in the ruined architecture of modernity. More over, I examine multiple factors of social location in relation to the representation of space and place. Finally, I consider Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1935) alongside Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988), as dialogical novels that refigure marginalized African-American and Native American oral traditions. Both comparisons highlight how the ambivalent position of "insider-outsider"--in relation to community, culture, race, nation, and tradition--lends itself to prophetic critique and vision.

MPACT Scores for Sheila Hassell Hughes

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 19:51:20

Advisors and Advisees Graph