Papers by Susannah B Mintz
The recurring spectacle of freakish female bodies in Aphra Behns fi tion and plays-"dwarf" and "g... more The recurring spectacle of freakish female bodies in Aphra Behns fi tion and plays-"dwarf" and "giant" sisters, sisters mute and deformed, a cousin-registers Behns peculiar anxiety about the negotiation of desire. obviously, such unnaturally sized and dysfunctional forms represent the ries of body and mind, sexual and psychical availability, poverty and w that Behn sought (perhaps ambiguously) to critique. The beautiful but sp less Maria, for example, along with her misshapen but witty sister Belvi in The Dumb Virgin , depict a starkly dichotomized view of the cultural tions women could occupy: sexually desirable as bodies, but unmanageab minds, either vulnerable to the aggressions of male desire or outspoken alone. Temporarily blind Celesia from The Unfortunate Bride seems to ex plify women's position as objects of a male gaze, never the agents of their looking or wanting. And the exaggerated sizes of the Jewish sisters from Second Part of The Rover manifest an obvious and ironic point about g and class transgression. The success of four different Englishmen's schem augment their status through the wealth of these "monsters of quality" is bo up with the women's ugliness: money alone cannot propel a poor fool ac the threshold into gentlemanliness, nor can it transform a monster into a tru desirable lady. While there appears to be little dispute about Behns royalist and Tory giances, critics have agreed less often on the precise nature of her stance on t role of women; her texts' notoriously ambivalent rendering of female charact makes any firm assessment of Behns "feminist" sympathies difficult to achie Susan Staves has argued that while Behn was clearly uncomfortable wit prevailing (and conflicting) gender ideologies of her day, the treatment o
Nancy Mairs began her literary career in 1984 with the publication of a book of poems, In All the... more Nancy Mairs began her literary career in 1984 with the publication of a book of poems, In All the Rooms of the Yellow House. At that time, nearly thirty years ago, feminism was in a period of transition from its second to its third and more eclectic wave; “disability studies” was not an established discipline in the humanities; and personal essay, though long practiced, had not yet been dignified by literary scholars as a form worthy of study. Mairs’s last published essay collection, A Dynamic God, appeared in 2007 in a very different social and literary milieu—one to which, as the essays included here attest, Mairs herself has contributed a great deal of intellectual and artistic energy.
Life Writing, Jan 2, 2016
ABSTRACT This essay theorises skin as a potential meeting point of Buddhist mindfulness, disabili... more ABSTRACT This essay theorises skin as a potential meeting point of Buddhist mindfulness, disability activism, and an ethics of care. The phenomenological turn in disability studies has redirected attention from social conditions to the materiality of the body, restoring discussions of pain, sexuality, and caregiving to disability praxis. Yet metaphors of health continue to suffuse philosophical work on moral agency and touch, and explanations of mindfulness tend similarly to assume a non-disabled physicality in their discussions of mind-body interaction. At the same time, little of the work on touch in the context of disability and pain focuses on the precise moment of contact between subjects. How, then, do we think and write about the symbolic import, and the psychotherapeutic value, of skin touching skin? Mindfulness practice begins with the belief that skin mediates between bodily and emotional states. If we take seriously the kind of skin-to-skin connection that might occur in instances where someone is in pain or has a disability, we might arrive at a more nuanced and sustainable notion of embodiment as the site of emotion, intelligence, and change. This in turn might foster ways of understanding ourselves as interdependent and corporeal beings, introducing the intensities and transformative potential of physical touch to the ways in which we conceptualise subjectivity.
Michigan Quarterly Review, Apr 1, 2009
In her many poems celebrating female friendship, Katherine Philips (1 632-64) repeatedly employs ... more In her many poems celebrating female friendship, Katherine Philips (1 632-64) repeatedly employs images of enclosure that testify at once to the en-grossing intensity of affection between women, and to the difficulty of achiev-ing and maintaining that affection. Philips\u27s speakers enclose themselves with their friends in realms both psychical and linguistic, carefully demarcating the boundaries that separate them from the fractious world of ..
Mintz argues that the poet Ai\u27s fourth book Fate, a collection of dramatic monologues, is mark... more Mintz argues that the poet Ai\u27s fourth book Fate, a collection of dramatic monologues, is marked by the unique voicelessness of a multi-ethnic woman. Her dramatic monologues construct reality through language and examine a postmodern world of fragmented allegiances in which no unmediated, inviolable feminine voice is possible
The disabled woman who writes the story of her body transgresses a partic ularly charged ideologi... more The disabled woman who writes the story of her body transgresses a partic ularly charged ideological boundary. Her rootedness in textual flesh, her stubborn insistence on telling the tale of a broken body, defy the disembod ied consciousness, the triumphant will and mind that are the legacy of Carte sian dualism as well as the originary point of much life writing by men.1 At the same time, she may also seem to reproduce a problematically essential ized view of female identity as meaningful only through the body. How does such an author take advantage of post-structuralist indeterminacy, the verbal play that locates identity and autobiography alike in a slippage of possibili ties, without also relinquishing the corporeal specificity by which she demands recognition of her experience? How does the idea of creating a self through writing reconcile itself to the way in which illness returns one so res olutely to the forces of anatomy? This essay will address such questions through discussion of Autobiogra phy of a Face, Lucy Grealy's account of a nearly twenty-year attempt to sur gically restore a jaw lost to cancer. In this narrative of disfiguring disease, Grealy does more than rewrite the "script" of female or disabled identity, as if the body were simply inert, "raw material" written on by cultural assump tions. While she does foreground the idea that selfhood is in part narrated by such forms of storytelling as movies, television shows, and medical dis course, she also insists that the body exerts its own force, emphasizing the combination of language and body in the formation of self. Indeed, Grealy suggests that thinking in terms of "twoness" at all—of "body" and "mind" as discrete, if connected, entities—falsely separates what are interpenetrating and mutually constitutive aspects of self. Instead, she demonstrates that her sense of self is inseparable from the condition of her face, even if, or espe cially because, that face is also subject to patriarchal attitudes toward female
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2011
As an author who ponders the big questions of life and death, Nancy Mairs has made a career of wr... more As an author who ponders the big questions of life and death, Nancy Mairs has made a career of writing relaxed, conversational essays that demystify traumatic events. Whether her focus is illness, depression, disability, suicide, adultery, murder, euthanasia, or the death penalty, Mairs grounds her essays in the tangible and frequently humorous rituals of daily life in a way that seems at once psychologically serious and rhetorically playful. Eschewing, on the one hand, a bygone ars moriendi tradition, and on the other the comic or transcendent plot common to disability and trauma narrative,1 Mairs offers an alternative framework for responding to difficult experiences as both arbitrary and inevitable, one that dignifies the process of grieving but is just as quick to emphasize the wonders and delight of a tactile, relational world. Focusing here on her 2001 collection A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, I want to address Mairs’s signature style through psychoanalytic theories of curiosity and work in order to understand what it means for Mairs, in her words, to “choose joy” (Waist-High 209). How does an author so acutely familiar with loss and sorrow manage to sustain, in the face of anguish, the possibility of renewal, plenitude, and pleasure?
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2011
In the first essay of her most recent collection, Waist-High in the World (1997), Nancy Mairs pos... more In the first essay of her most recent collection, Waist-High in the World (1997), Nancy Mairs poses again the question that has informed her writing for more than a decade: Who would I be ifl didn\u27t have MS? (8). Not at all glibly rhetorical, the question lies at the center of Mairs\u27s autobiographical project, which attempts both to articulate the significance of a disabled female body in the construction of her identity and to invent an aesthetics of that multiply ..
George Herbert Journal, 1994
Philological Quarterly, 1998
In the fourteen-line catalogue of metaphors that constitutes Herbert's "Prayer (I),"... more In the fourteen-line catalogue of metaphors that constitutes Herbert's "Prayer (I)," the speaker describes prayer as a "soul in paraphrase" (3) and "something understood" (14).(1) Both render the subtle experience of (and hope for) perfect communication between self and God in the act of praying. Both capture a sense of deep psychological attunement in which the self's own "paraphrase" will be "understood" by the other. "Something" suggests an indeterminacy that is inclusive at the same time that it specifies: whatever "something" is, it will be heard, interpreted, and acknowledged in the intermediary space of psychical connection. Indeed, "something understood" seems to exist in what object-relations psychoanalytic theory has termed the transitional space, created by two minds sharing the "in between" of mutual understanding.(2) A restless effort to find the "something understood," I believe, characterizes the urgency of so many poems throughout The Temple. And it is perhaps that very "something understood" that becomes the site, the medium, for the delicate negotiations involved in Herbert's attempts to retain, in the face of a powerful God, the viability of his human self. While the terrain of the Herbertian speaker's interactions with God has been formidably surveyed via a range of critical strategies, the preponderance of accounts renders the poet nearly speechless, arguing on both religious and artistic grounds that Herbert disappears as active agent of his own writing. Scholars broadly following Rosemond Tuve's A Reading of George Herbert regard The Temple as an expression of Herbert's Anglican theology. Barbara Lewalski insists in Protestant Poetics that "the new Protestant aesthetics" is "the very foundation" of Herbert's poetry (283), and Richard Strier is similarly adamant about the inseparability of Herbert's verse and theology: the poems only become "intelligible," Strier writes, when read in the context of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith, without which we "miss or distort the actual shape and force of many of the poems" (65). Diana Benet's stated purpose in Secretary of Praise is "to elucidate Herbert's poetry by reference to grace and charity as two of the major themes of The Temple ..."(2). Interpretations such as Strier's and Benet's "hold fast" to a sense of the permanence of the individual in relation to God; Benet, for instance, writes that "the `collectivity' that is the Church, or the Christian community, does not deprive the individual self of its experience or of its particular perception of the experience" (50). But by binding that self to the strictures of theology, they also present a vision of Herbert as unexceptionally, even abjectly, submissive to doctrine.(3) Less concerned with Herbert's work as a documentation of theological principles than as a measure of the ontological persistence of poetry, Stanley Fish in his influential Self-Consuming Artifacts and Barbara Leah Harman (responding to Fish in Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert's Poetry) home in on Herbert's efforts toward self-realization in a way that pays tribute to the drama of self-other dynamics, where nothing less than the poet's claim to an autonomous identity is at stake. Both, however, ultimately diminish Herbert's status as a separate self capable of independent creative production. Fish proposes that Herbert's lyrics "can be viewed as a graduated series of `undoings' and `letting go's': and move and have our (separate) beings ... the undoing of the self as an independent entity ... an undoing of the poem as the product of a mind distinct from the mind of God" (157-58).(4) Fish claims that Herbert "lets his poems go, so that both they and the consciousness whose independence they were supposedly asserting give themselves up to God" (190). "Letting go" signifies "the discarding of those very habits of thought and mind that preserve our dignity by implying our independence" (157). …
Life Writing, Dec 1, 2012
Once the domain of statesmen and war heroes, already-renowned writers and the soon-to-be-beatifie... more Once the domain of statesmen and war heroes, already-renowned writers and the soon-to-be-beatified, autobiography has become a democratic genre. Now it is not so much the powerful who write autobiography, but autobiography that confers the power of self-authorship upon the individual. In the act of telling our stories, we materialise. There is a degree of hubris in this impulse: we put ourselves centre-stage. But in claiming those life stories as legitimately told*in assuming an audience of persuadable, if not already sympathetic, readers*we might also defy stereotypes, resist the nullifying effects of those other, more dominant narratives in which we play but bit parts, relegated to the periphery. Much contemporary life writing participates in such reclamation projects, making subjects of people whose circumstances or characteristics may have denied them social agency. And so we write to reestablish a sense of perspective, to express something vital about our experiences that we hope will at once guarantee selfhood and create community. We call this autobiographical enterprise speaking out, making visible, giving voice, being heard, in language that seems almost inescapably corporeal*just as much psychoanalytic theory, and indeed our language of identity generally is also a bodily one. When we write (and do we not understand ‘writing’ as the hand that types, the eyes that read what’s there, the brain that thinks?), we write a life story into existence, and that story has a kind of physiological arc. We grow up to accumulate the expected markers of success in linear, or at least narratively dramatic, fashion, according to life cycles that are, by virtue of human aging, inherently physical. Along the way we see to believe. We’re taught to stand on our own two feet, follow in our forebears’ footsteps, Life Writing VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2012)
Pacific Coast Philology, 2000
SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 1999
Richard Crashaw's graphic depictions of the body seem to consternate scholars far less than t... more Richard Crashaw's graphic depictions of the body seem to consternate scholars far less than they once did, in part because an artistic focus on wounds, blood, and milk can be read as influenced by the various religious and intellectual movements of Crashaw's time. But historical and/or iconographic explanations have frequently had the effect of glossing over the more troubling aspects of the poet's relationship to women. This paper will argue that two of Crashaw's most familiar epigrams, "Luke 2. QucritJesum Suum Maria" and the much-maligned "Luke i1. Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked ," reveal a more complicated relation to the maternal body than re-evaluations of Crashaw's aesthetic have suggested. The question remains a difficult one, particularly in view of recent studies whose explicit concern to address the roles of Mary and St. Teresa in Crashaw's ceuvre have presented a more uniformly "feminist" Crashaw than was formerly acknowledged, but which also seem to minimize the psychological conflictedness about maternal figures clearly exhibited in certain poems. In drawing on the paradigms of Melanie Klein's object-relations theory-specifically her concept of the child's ambivalent relatedness with a radically split mother figure-my aim is neither to reprise the all-toofamiliar epithets of infantile grostesquerie that have haunted psychoanalytic Crashavian scholarship in the past, nor to reassert Crashaw as misogynistic. Rather, Klein's vision of consciousness as animated by complex "'phantasies"1 about the mother offers a compelling model for unpacking Crashaw's poetic relation to the figure (and body) of Mary and to the question of gender. Klein posited an ongoing exchange of psychical "positions" in which the infant's overwhelming anxiety about the mother's body and phantasized destruction of it would be replaced by guilt and an effort to
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Feb 20, 2014
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2011
Given the notorious resistance of physical pain to textual representation, how does an author wri... more Given the notorious resistance of physical pain to textual representation, how does an author write the story of pain? Using Eula Biss's 2005 essay "The Pain Scale" as its touchstone, the article considers lyric essay as pain's most suitable autobiographical genre. A lyric essay, it is argued, can perform the kind of conceptual shift that many theorists of pain have called for, situating pain along the pathways not just of nerves but of subjectivity, of relationships between self and other, imagination and words. By turns elusive, imagistic, ecstatic, associative, and melodic, more often circling and symbolizing life events than narrating them in linear ways, the lyric essay has a unique capacity to represent the self-in-pain, giving pain a rich experiential dimensionality that it may lack in more conventional, particularly medical, accounts. In "The Pain Scale, " Biss does not render pain as an adjunct to other physical experiences, such as addiction or disease, but rather capitalizes on the distinctive fragmentation and emotional intensity of the lyrical essay to capture the movement of pain. In a form where pain becomes affirming rather than negating, an avowal of the self's aliveness and of its impact on the world, new articulations can occurof how we conceive of, and therefore live, with pain.
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Papers by Susannah B Mintz
The works date from as early as 1470 to as recent as 2018. While most of the authors are from the US, one-third of the works are by authors from elsewhere around the globe. Care was also given to represent a wide range of other cultures, heritage, and lifestyles, in areas such as religion, sexual orientation, gender identification, color, and other factors that, along with disability, constitute intersectional experiences. At least half the works included represent such at least one diversity factor.
Available Open Access: https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/53188/BOLT_Book4CD.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&fbclid=IwAR11q2OZcru-T1IFXUJ8RZZ4RBB2J7KDuX8wdEOZfKKBE8pTGckYp2COLNU