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The Anxiety of Women’s Authorship in Kate Zambreno's Atotheoretical Texts
Maša Grdešić
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Sažetak
Kate Zambreno’s 2012 study Heroines is an autotheoretical text which combines feminist literary criticism with autobiographical elements in order to highlight both historical and contemporary obstacles to women’s authorship, as well as their connection to anxiety and depression experienced by women authors. In Heroines, Zambreno uncovers the long history of neglect and rejection of women’s writing, be it by modernist authors such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Vivienne Eliot or by the contemporary writers combining the private voice with the public nature of writing. She thus establishes continuity with Elaine Showalter’s ideas on the “female literary tradition”, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s concept of anxiety of authorship, and Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the material and immaterial difficulties that continue to prevent young women from writing. Opposing a critical tradition that suppresses emotion – particularly women’s anger – as irrational, Zambreno develops a poetics that seeks to express these emotions and affirm anger and corporeality as feminist strategies of resistance and creative force. The article also considers Zambreno’s more recent autotheoretical works, in which she leaves behind the frenetic tone of Heroines but maintains anxiety of authorship as her central theme, now further shaped by questions of motherhood, economic precarity, and the pressures of capitalist publishing that exploits the public (self-)exposure of women writers. Although she has become more cautious in revealing her intimacy and more aware of the risks of public visibility, her writing continues to function as an irritant that challenges literary, cultural, and social norms, while seeking a space of artistic freedom through radical openness and honesty, and creating a space of solidarity and community. The analysis examines both formal and thematic aspects of Zambreno’s autotheoretical texts as well as poses broader questions about how literary criticism, by privileging the rational while suppressing the emotional and personal, continues to neglect the writing of women and other marginalized groups, thereby sustaining the patriarchal value system.
Ključne riječi
Kate Zambreno; women’s authorship; anxiety; autotheory; emotion; body
Hrčak ID:
338347
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.11.2025.
Posjeta: 623 *