Jardine's command of French theory is awesome. Even more impressive is the fact that she manages to delve into the subject without ever losing sight of certain impertinent American questions. "-Jane Gallop, Department of French and Italian, Miami University Gynesis: from the Greek—gyn- signifying woman, and -sis designating process. In her book, Alice Jardine charts the territories and landscapes of contemporary French thought, focusing on such concepts as "woman" and "the feminine," and relating them to the problem of modernity. Interdisciplinary in her approach, she confronts and addresses important psychoanalytic, philosophical, and fictional texts that are largely the work of male writers. In Part One Jardine charts the general boundaries of what she describes as the "problematization" of woman, and in Part Two she explores three major topologies of contemporary French thought—the breakdown of the Cartesian Subject, the default of Representation, and the demise of Man's Truth. Part Three analyzes the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, three major French thinkers who, according to Jardine, are deeply involved in the process of gynesis, and discusses their readings of such writers as Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Tournier. A final section turns to the question of comparativism by discussing male American and French writers—those self-consciously exploring the conceptual territories mapped in Part Two. Looking at her texts from the vantage point of an American feminist, Jardine voices the hope that feminism and modernity will not become mutually exclusive and, by the same token, that feminism will not grow less concerned with the question of female stereotyping. A brilliant and engaging book that will undoubtedly provoke controversy, Gynesis should find a large audience among students of contemporary thought—including feminists, literary and cultural critics, and philosophers.

Applying Deleuze's schizoanalytic techniques to film theory, Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror demonstrates how an embodied approach to horror film analysis can help us understand how film affects its viewers and distinguish those films which reify static, hegemonic, “molar” beings from those which prompt fluid, nonbinary, “molecular” becomings. It does so by analyzing the politics of reproduction in contemporary films such as Ex Machina; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Mad Max: Fury Road; the Twilight saga; and the original Alien quadrilogy and its more recent prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Author Sunny Hawkins argues that films which promote a “monstrous philosophy” of qualitative, affirmative difference as difference-in-itself, and which tend to be more molecular than molar in their expressions, can help us trace a “line of flight” from the gender binary in the real world. Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror demonstrates how the techniques of horror film – editing, sound and visual effects, lighting and colour, camera movement – work in tandem with a film's content to affect the viewer's body in ways that disrupt the sense of self as a whole, unified subject with a stable, monolithic identity and, in some cases, can serve to breakdown the binary between self/Other, as we come to realize that we are none of us static, categorizable beings but are, as Henri Bergson said, “living things constantly becoming.”

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"This volume of literary and cultural theory continues certain debates that dominated feminism in the early 1980s. Those were formative years for academic feminism in the U.S. because a critical mass of feminist scholars was promoted or granted tenure; black, Chicana, and other "Third World" feminists solidified a separate power base; multicultural feminist organizations such as the National Women's Studies Association came of age; and French feminist works were published in English translation for the first time. The traditional concerns of feminism - how to analyze women's oppression and act politically to end it - were moved to a new level of complexity as an understanding of women's differences became practically and theoretically more urgent and feminists were empowered in startling and unprecedented ways." "The writers anthologized here do not all speak in the same voice, but they do all address the issues of difference so eloquently articulated by Bernice Johnson Reagon in 1981: How do we think about difference, and how do we build an effective feminist movement around it?" "That year, Reagon spoke at the West Coast Women's Music Festival, and a few years later she reworked her presentation for inclusion in Barbara Smith's Home Girls. Subtitled "Turning the Century," Reagon's talk was about the difference between feeling at home in feminism, between having "a space that is 'yours only' - just for the people you want to be there," and crossing what she called "first people boundaries" to make a revolution - that is, "really doing coalition work," the crucial work for feminists as we look forward to the twenty-first century." "Now, in 1992, some people would say that the gaps - racial, cultural, political, and discursive - between Bernice Johnson Reagon and most academic feminists in the 1990s are absolutely unbridgeable. Which may well be true. But those very gaps also signify not the irrelevance to academic feminists of Reagon and the variety of streetwise black feminism she represents (or vice versa), but compelling reasons to attend closely to her analysis. In "Turning the Century," Reagon asked feminists (including academic feminists) to examine three major issues: the tensions between separatism and coalition-building (both of which, she held, are politically necessary); the dangers of "mono-issue" critical perspectives and agendas for activism; and the destructiveness to feminist communities of forgetting "the principles that are the basis of [our] practice." Today, more than a decade later, these issues are still important and far from being resolved. This volume works toward achieving that goal."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This highly useful series presents criticism on the major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists, who died between 1900 and 1999. Each volume presents overviews of four to eight authors which typically include an author portrait, an introduction to the author, a primary bibliography, annotated criticism and an annotated list of further reading sources. A cumulative title index to the entire series is published separately (included in subscription).