Shira Wolosky – författare

Defying traditional definitions of public and private as gendered terms, and broadening discussion of women’s writing in relation to feminist work done in other fields, this study addresses American women’s poetry from the seventeenth to late-twentieth century. Engaging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, history, political theory, religious culture, cultural studies, and poetics, this study provides entry into some of the founding feminist discussions across disciplines, moving beyond current scholarship to pursue an interpretation of feminism’s defining interests and assumptions in the context of women’s writing. The author emphasizes and explores how women’s writing expresses their active participation in community and civic life, emerging from and shaping a woman’s selfhood as constituted through relationships, not only on the personal level, but as forming community commitments. This distinctive formation of the self finds expression in women’s voices and other poetic forms of expression, with the aesthetic power of poetry itself bringing different arenas of human experience to bear on each other in mutual interrogation and reflection. Women poets have addressed the public world, directly or through a variety of poetic structures and figures, and in doing so they have defined and expressed specific forms of selfhood engaged in and committed to communal life.

Defying traditional definitions of public and private as gendered terms, and broadening discussion of women’s writing in relation to feminist work done in other fields, this study addresses American women’s poetry from the seventeenth to late-twentieth century. Engaging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, history, political theory, religious culture, cultural studies, and poetics, this study provides entry into some of the founding feminist discussions across disciplines, moving beyond current scholarship to pursue an interpretation of feminism’s defining interests and assumptions in the context of women’s writing. The author emphasizes and explores how women’s writing expresses their active participation in community and civic life, emerging from and shaping a woman’s selfhood as constituted through relationships, not only on the personal level, but as forming community commitments. This distinctive formation of the self finds expression in women’s voices and other poetic forms of expression, with the aesthetic power of poetry itself bringing different arenas of human experience to bear on each other in mutual interrogation and reflection. Women poets have addressed the public world, directly or through a variety of poetic structures and figures, and in doing so they have defined and expressed specific forms of selfhood engaged in and committed to communal life.

Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. Language in many form – texts, books and scrolls; learning, interpretation, material practices that generate material practices – are central to Judaic conduct, experience, and spirituality. In this Judaic traditions differ from philosophical and theological ones that make language secondary. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the immaterial and unchanging, as unchanging truth that language can at best convey and at worst distort. Such traditional metaphysics has come under critique since Nietzsche in ways that the author explores. Shira Wolosky argues that Judaic traditions converge with contemporary metaphysical critique rather than being its target. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, Scholem and others, the author examines traditions of Judaic interpretation against backgrounds of biblical exegesis; sign-theory as it recasts language meaning in ways that concord with Judaic textuality; negative theology as it differs in Judaic tradition from those which negate language itself; and lastly outline a discourse ethics that draws on Judaic language theory.

This study is directed to students and scholars of: Judaic thought, religious studies and theology; theory of interpretation; Levinas and other modern Jewish philosophical writers, placing them in broader contexts of philosophy, theology, and language theory. It is shown how Jewish discourses on language address urgent problems of value and norms in the contemporary world that has challenged traditional anchors of truth and meaning.