[DOWNLOAD] "Cosmopoetics and Politics: Were Those "Unacknowledged Legislators of the World" Actually Women?(Critical Essay)" by Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cosmopoetics and Politics: Were Those "Unacknowledged Legislators of the World" Actually Women?(Critical Essay)
- Author : Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 278 KB
Description
I begin with Virginia Woolfs "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." (1) In A Room of One's Own, Woolf theorizes that "we think back through our [literary] mothers, if we are women." (2) Mary Wollstonecraft, in her eighteenth-century A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, advocates for a woman's right to education and asks for the education of both sexes. (3) Today, I see Wollstonecraft's inheritors in Assia Djebar and Mahasweta Devi, women who are educating all of us while calling for political awareness and action. I use the term "Cosmopoetics" to define generally the nature of their aesthetics and to suggest specifically "how [their] contemporary narratives [which are worldwide rather than provincial in scope] determine and change readers' 'comprehensions of cultural differences.'" (4) I claim "Legislators of the World" from Percy Bysshe Shelley's nineteenth -century "The Defense of Poetry" to emphasize both the social conscience of Devi and Djebar and the political potential in their writing. The phrase "Legislators of the World" implies a much larger domain than simply that of the male poet, which is suggested in Shelley's unfortunate use of the masculine pronoun throughout his "Defense." And his "poets" as legislators are actually those makers, poetry derives from the Greek verb poiein to make, who work to creatively and imaginatively transform the world. (5) Although the word "poetess" was ascribed to nineteenth century women writers, these poetesses, as Isobel Armstrong laments, were hamstrung by "duty" which forced them to uphold traditional patriarchal lines concerning what was expected in their verse. (6)