Subject to change: Reading feminist writing

Gender and Culture Series

by Nancy K. Miller

What can reading for the gender of signature tell us about the act of reading as a poetics and politics? In Subject to Change Miller demonstrates the textual effects of female authorship in the production, reception, and circulation of women's writing. In the wake of Roland Barthes's famously Dead Author, Miller argues for the cultural vitality of feminist writing subjects.

285 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

Nancy K. Miller is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to recreate her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novel, and women’s studies.

Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.

After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.