The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms

In this provocative rereading of the classic texts of the feminist literary canon, Carla Kaplan takes a hard look at the legacy of feminist criticism and argues that important features of feminism’s own canon have been overlooked in the rush to rescue and identify. African-American women’s texts, she demonstrates, often dramatize their distrust of their readers, their lack of faith in “the cultural conversation,” through strategies of self-silencing and “self-talk.” At the same time, she argues, the homoerotics of women’s writing has too often gone unremarked. Not only does longing for an ideal listener draw women’s texts into a romance with the reader, but there is an erotic excess which is part of feminist critical recuperation, itself.
Drawing on a wide range of resources, from sociolinguistics and anthropology to literary theory, Kaplan’s highly readable study proposes a new model for understanding and representing “talk.”