Stealing The Language represents the first comprehensive appraisal of women's poetry in American and brilliantly defines one of the most exciting and original literary movement of our time.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Autonomy is considered to be an important feature of professionals and to provide a necessary basis for their informed judgments. In this article these notions will be challenged. In this article I use Michel Foucault's deconstruction of the idea of the autonomous citizen, and his later attempts to reconstruct that idea, in order to bring some new perspectives to the discussion about the foundation of professionalism. The turning point in Foucault's discussion about autonomy is to be found in his proposal (...) for an ethics of the self. This ethics invites a break with the normalising discourses of modernity. As I see it, this makes it particularly relevant to a discussion about the principles of professionalism. The conception of parrhesia is central. I use the role of the teacher to illustrate my arguments. (shrink)

The concept ‘silence’ has diametrically opposed meanings; it connotes peace and contemplation as well as death and oblivion. Silence can also be considered a practice. There is keeping the rule of silence to still the mind and find inner truth, as well as forcibly silencing in the sense of subjugating another to one's own purposes. The concept of teaching runs the gamut between these extremes, from respectfully leading students to search and discover, to relentlessly bending them to one's own will. (...) This article examines contradictory connotations and practices of silence and teachers’ ambivalent perceptions of it in order to conceptualize a positive practice of silence for teacher education. (shrink)

The author contends that the novels of the period 1969--1988 served as a dialogue among women authors and their readers as they attempted to deal with dramatic alterations in attitudes toward career, sexuality, and continued tension between personal autonomy and cultural sexism. In readings of novels by American, British, and Canadian authors, including Gail Godwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Margaret Atwood, the author proposes that the narrative devices of irony and fantasy that are used (...) commonly in these novels reflect women's increased detachment from cultural attempts to define women's nature and role, and their needs to imagine alternative ways of ordering their own lives and the structure of society itself. Rather than a chronological or author-by-author study, this insightful book integrates references to and readings of the novels in several areas of emphasis: the novel as a means of communication among women of this period, the relationship between irony and fantasy as narrative elements and the authors' concern with language itself, the novelists' tendency to use multiple narrative voices that continuously revise the concept of a fixed "self" and the stories that have traditionally defined the female self, the use of dreams, fantasies, and even madness as means of transcendence, and the frequent creation of utopian or dystopian visions of past or future. The author concludes that a pervasive theme in women's novels of the past twenty years, from Lessing's The Four--Gated City to Atwood's Cat's Eye, is the radical questioning of received tradition. She concludes as well that the alternative society collectively envisioned by these would value women's intellectual as well emotional powers, recognize their sexuality, reformulate the concept of power, and recognize women's full participation in the creation of language and meaning. (shrink)

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter “what” she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, “Who is speaking?” and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, “It’s me.” Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with (...) the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the “devocalization of Logos,” as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a “politics of the voice” wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking. (shrink)