Title: The Artist is Missing: Recovering Women Writers
Presenter: Heidi Arndt, PhD English
4:00 pm
242 O’Shaughnessy & Zoom
Recovery is the feminist methodology that seeks to revive interest in women writers whose work has gone missing from the records of literary history. It is a practice motivated by the desire to not only correct a perceived injustice, but also the desire of contemporary women writers to locate themselves in a robust literary tradition. Recovery became popular among the so-called gynocritics of the 1970s, fell out of favor, and now appears to be on the rise again, albeit in a different form. In this dissertation excerpt, I explore the far-reaching implications and underlying ideologies of those earliest practitioners of recovery. By doing so, I hope to discover why those practices took the forms they did, why they faltered, and how new writers have changed the methods while staying true to the underlying desires for continuity and connection across time.
Heidi Arndt is a fourth year PhD candidate in the English Department. Her dissertation research examines the work of “recovery” as a defining modality for queer and feminist scholarship in the 21st century. She is most interested in contemporary authors with unabashed emotional investments in recovery work (Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Shola von Reinhold, and Jenn Shapland, to name just a few) as well as the modernist texts they are so often drawn to. She also has a particular interest in bisexual representation in books and media.