Our Project
This is a work of feminist literary and rhetorical recovery, an anti-anthology of women writers and writing.
Produced by Santa Clara University students and faculty in the context of a women’s literature course taught online during a pandemic and an election year, it contributes to the project of studying women’s literature by anthologizing women writers, but it does so while centering questions about what women’s literature is, where it has come from, what it has been, and what it might be, and refusing to resolve these questions.Having studied the genre of anthologies, particularly anthologies of women writers and scholarship on recovery and gender critique, we call this volume an anti-anthology because we are conscious of the pitfalls of “rescue, recovery, and reinscription” (Kirsch and Royster)—the ways our attempts to include some voices can serve to exclude others. We have asked ourselves:
How do we study the diverse array of women writers and writing in ways that don’t allow us to slip into essentialism or tokenism? That don’t fall into the same logics and systems that excluded women in the first instance, but instead allow us to continue to question our own assumptions and judgements while reading? That reveal the networks of human and non-human others that have produced the work, and produce our reading and writing in response to it? That make us--and our embodied experiences as readers, researchers and writers--part of the story? And how do we do this work while knowing, as one student in this course said, that we are destined to fail?Facing the seeming paradoxes of feminist recovery head-on, our project was to study women’s writing not by attempting coverage of the “most important” or most deserving or most canonical authors—an impossible feat—but to study the very act of recovery itself, and use our research and writing to produce an volume that works against the centripedal (and ultimately conservative and exclusionary) impulse of anthologization that has long been observed by feminist theorists in rhetorical and literary studies (see Bizzel; Sharer).
We did so by setting boundaries around our work:
we read and researched only those texts that happen to be held in our own institution’s archives.
Focusing on our own archives allowed us to make the politics of the archive a part of our attention. As a historically male college (made coeducational only in 1960) as well as a primarily white and economically privileged institution, our archival holdings have reflected the interests and identities of the institution and its members. We attended to the pervasive whiteness of our (and many other) archival holdings, and our own identities and privileges as well. This is a reality, a material condition that we might be tempted to work around. Instead, making the structural inequity that undergirds all work of literary production, circulation, reception, and preservation part of our work helped to reveal the structures of power and privilege that they represent—structures that have been (and continue to be) crucial to shaping women’s lives and literatures.
With our select authors and texts in hand, we then set out to create a born-digital anthology that might record and extend this process by connecting the work of these authors and of our student authors to readers like you—and to do so in a way that might preserve its own status as a provisional and limited artifact, merely a snapshot of the “story so far” that these women and these students together are telling. To gesture towards this goal, we have provided here a non-linear anthology with multiple pathways for you to explore, each revealing different connections between and among writers, places, times, experiences, identities, and textual forms.
There are likely other connections here that we have not yet considered ourselves, but remain for readers to observe. We hope this supports the project of revealing a literary and rhetorical history (as Sarah Noble Frank put it) not “as such” but “as if”—the enactment of an alternative theoretical approach to feminist recovery in English studies.
As an enacted theory of literary and cultural recovery, we hope that it serves both as a contribution to the work of women’s recovery in literary and cultural history and as a model for how to advance that work in other archives and classrooms, where students might produce alternative anthologies to further elaborate the rich history of women’s literary and rhetorical practice. Your anthology will look different, because your institution is different, your archive is different, and you are different. We hope you will connect your work to ours and to continue to build the network of feminist readers and writers that this work seeks both to represent and to initiate.
How to Navigate Our "Book"
Each read it may be different. Please, take a time to revisit this and see how you may understand it differently. That is what "everday literature" is about. We are not lining up our selections like ducks in a row, or meaning to necessarily "compare" them like anthology structures may do. Identitiy is too complicated for that. We hope our selections or authors may show themselves in more ways to you than one.
Whatever your positionality as a reader, we invite you in this web text to considers enacting exactly the "juncture," the "crossroads," or the "moment" in rhetoric appropriate to your identity and place in time alongside ours. Our editing efforts hope to be transparent, so you may understand the positionality of authors the way we may only represent them through archival recovery and our stakes, opportunities, and privilege to share these important rhetorical works not as ours, as editors. Translators maybe.
Think of this as a Pandora's Box — or Pandora's textbook? Whatever your journey through it, we hope you see the dimensionality of the selected authors not only as writers, but as embodied persons with identities.
You may begin with any of the main threads through the book by clicking on the paths below.