Women Writing Culture

Gary A. Olson is Professor of English and teaches in the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida. He is co-editor, with Sidney I. Dobrin, of Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom, also published by SUNY Press. In 1993 the Council of Editors of Learned Journals presented him with the International Award for Distinguished Retiring Editor for his decade of work as editor of the Journal of Advanced Composition. Elizabeth Hirsh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida. She is author of Re-Producing Modernism: Irigaray, Formalism, and the Place of the Woman Writer (forthcoming), as well as various articles on feminist theory and modern literature.

"Is that why I and many others engage in the processes of interviews, where the collective logics of control of speech and writing systematically disturb our more single-minded literary and scholarly illusions? Is that what Women Writing Culture—a title made up of three impossible signifiers strung together in a feeding web of layered conversations about writing, literacy, rationality, and knowledge among six strangely assorted comrades and their kindly inquisitors—might engender? If, as bell hooks maintains, language is a critical site of struggle, and literacy projects are freedom projects, then these interviews materialize feminist commitments to practical conversation and worldly, differentiated visions." — Donna Haraway, from the Foreword"Olson and Hirsh do more than interview the theorists that speak through this book. They also demonstrate what it means to be public intellectuals themselves by challenging mythologies that frame academics as 'stars' and by relentlessly interrogating each theorist about those in-between places of writing and pedagogy that are generally ignored by most social critics. The result is a dialogue that is crisp, unapologetic, riveting, and challenging." — Henry A. Giroux, from the Afterword

• Foreword Donna HarawayIntroduction Starting from Marginalized Lives: A Conversation with Sandra Harding Elizabeth Hirsh and Gary A. OlsonWriting, Literacy and Technology: Toward a Cyborg Writing Gary A. OlsonComposition, Collaboration, and Women's Ways of Knowing:A Conversation with Mary Belenky Evelyn Ashton-Jones and Dene Kay ThomasFeminist Praxis and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation with bell hooks Gary A. Olson and Elizabeth Hirsh"Je—Luce Irigaray": A Meeting with Luce Irigaray Elizabeth Hirsh and Gary A. OlsonResisting a Discourse of Mastery: A Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard Gary A. OlsonWriting the Space of the Public Intellectual: Afterword to Women Writing Culture Henry A. GirouxContributors Index