Performing intersectional identities : four Jewish women poets in the 20th century
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation considers how poetry can be a mode of performing identity, particularly for those on the margins. I argue that because it is not only composed of but also always draws our attention back to language itself, poetry is a kind of performative utterance that constitutes that which it names. Through a consideration of works by four poets positioned at the intersection of multiple margins, as women and Jews, some of them queer, some immigrants, I demonstrate the particular strategies that poetry offers for reappropriating tactics of oppression in the performance of a self. The first chapter focuses on Gertrude Stein's "surface poetics" through which Stein reappropriates modes of objectification while resisting a penetrative/interpretive gaze, drawing our attention to the surface of her poems, a surface on which, I argue, her performance of a lesbian Jewish identity unfolds. In the second chapter, I examine anti-grammaticality in the works of the first "native" modern Hebrew poet, Esther Raab, and show how she deploys Hebrew's highly gendered grammar to enact a female-Jewish identity in a language and tradition that has historically erased women's voices and experiences. A third chapter on Zelda Schneerson explores how the poet reappropriates Hebrew's capacity for agentless and impersonal constructions in the enactment of her identity as a religious woman poet in a literary milieu dominated by secular men. My final chapter on Adrienne Rich focuses on her revaluation of relationality as a poetic and political strategy through which the poet reimagines personal and collective identities, revealing the ties that bind us to one another.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Olidort, Shoshana |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Eshel, Amir |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Shemtov, Vered Karti |
| Degree committee member | Eshel, Amir |
| Degree committee member | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Shemtov, Vered Karti |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Shoshana Olidort. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/qx913gw8915 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Shoshana Olidort
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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