The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives

by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Editor)

The female body has occupied a central place in the Western imagination, its images pervading poetry and story, mythology and religious doctrine, the visual arts, and scientific treatises. It has inspired both attraction and fear, been perceived as beautiful and unclean, alluring and dangerous, a source of pleasure and nurturing but also a source of evil and destruction. In The Female Body in Western Culture , twenty-three internationally noted scholars and critics, in specially commissioned essays, explore these representations and their consequences for contemporary art and culture. Ranging from Genesis to Gertrude Stein and Angela Carter, from ancient Greek ritual to the Victorian sleeping cure, from images of the Madonna to modern film and Surrealist art, the essays cover a wide spectrum of approaches and subject mailer. They all converge, however, around questions of power and powerlessness, voice and silence, subjecthood and objectification. And they point the way to the new possibilities and displacements of traditional male-female oppositions. Androgyny in a new key? This book demonstrates that a blurring of gender boundaries does not have to deny difference.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Research, 20th Century, Theory

400 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 1986

About the author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature

She was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

Suleiman is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 100 articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in 20th-century France. Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War; Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre; Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. She has edited and co-edited influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.

In addition to her scholarly work, Suleiman is the author of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, a memoir about Hungary. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, Moment Magazine and other newspapers and magazines.

Suleiman has won many honors, including a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. She has been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, as well as the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2015-16 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in College Station, Texas, and in the fall of 2017 a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I do track representation and objectification of the female form in the visual arts, this book was of particular interest. The book isn't entirely devoted to art, although, it provides concepts that are applicable to the representation of the female body in art.

[Aelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Speaking silences: women's suicide" an essay written by Margaret Higonnet, was the reason why I bought this book. It is not an example of the best essay writing, however was informative. Nevertheless, if one is interested in the topic of how women's suicide has been perceived and which motivations are used in literature to explain voluntary death - it would be an informative read.
The book contains 22 other essays addressing women's representation in western culture from various perspectives (photography, cinema, literature, etc.).


For more elaborate academic work on the topic of suicide in art I would suggest Art of Suicide by Ron Brown and The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by A. Alvarez.