Reviews for Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America

The average rating for Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-10 00:00:00 Lara Michell I loved her writing style-- so much better than all the heavy philosophy that normally characterizes narrative inquiry. Her use of literary critique methods to better analyze a text was fascinating to me. Some of her points could have been more clearly made by choosing better texts to analyze. I also thought that the point was to apply an understanding of textual fissures to communication scholarship-- and she mostly does it with fiction. I would have like to have seen more analysis like she does in her introduction.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-03 00:00:00 Christopher Higgins Schocket does not see class as just a stable definition that can be fixed in any one term. Still, he believes it can be a universal concept: "Class is totalizing, but it is simultaneously unstable. It does not describe entities and moments; it describes processes that are open to change" (x). Like so many scholars in working class studies, he bases much of his scholarship on Marx's teachings. The book's chapters look at literature immediately following the Civil War to the early 1940s, following the Great Depression. Many of the books he critiques are often overlooked in scholarship. Although I am unaware of a lot of the books he discusses, Schocket does a couple of close looks at the writer Rebecca Harding Davis. He notes that she is not of the class, and therefore an observer. And though the gaze writers of the wealthier classes, like Davis, can be problematic, he argues that the gaze can invite sentiment, a common goal in nineteenth century literature. The chapter "The Fetish of Being Inside" explores the body; especially interesting are the looks at text that deal with the working woman, from both male and female writers' perspectives. He states that the body itself was political, in literature as elsewhere. He looks at the pain of the worker, anywhere from marching to birth, death, and rape. Here, Schocket takes a close look at Meridel Le Sueur and how the problematic sharing of being an outsider looking in and being one of those insiders, suffering.