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Mother Tongues : Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation by Barbara Johnson (2003, Hardcover)

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About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHarvard University Press

ISBN-100674011872

ISBN-139780674011878

eBay Product ID (ePID)6016475

Product Key Features

Number of Pages224 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameMother Tongues : Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation

Publication Year2003

SubjectFeminism & Feminist Theory, Gender Studies, General, Translating & Interpreting, Human Sexuality (See Also Social Science / Human Sexuality)

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaLiterary Criticism, Social Science, Language Arts & Disciplines, Psychology

AuthorBarbara Johnson

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight15 Oz

Item Length8.8 in

Item Width5.9 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2003-051077

Dewey Edition21

ReviewsBarbara Johnson has the most beautiful mind -- subtle, fearless, funny, logical, preternaturally alert to words and their worlds. Mother Tongues encounters central figures of modern culture and the great questions of culture--- why do we read, why do we write, why do we use a mother tongue? Her illuminations are vital and deep., Mother Tongues is a work of psychological depth and poetic organization. It builds on Johnson's oeuvre by developing new ways of conceiving language and world, most valuably through reinterpretations of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and their reception. Johnson's turn and return to these authors, and the subtle inquiry into the ontological dimensions of language that results, should be of interest to anyone concerned about modernity and its reifications. This book is an elegant, important, and subtle addition to Johnson's searching work, a valuable contribution to Benjamin scholarship and scholarship on modern sexuality, and an idiosyncratic and inventive work of contemporary literary theory and comparative literature., Mother Tongues offers a set of brilliant, interwoven readings of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Plath, affirming once again Barbara Johnson's reputation as the most extraordinary of contemporary theorists. In poetry and prose alike, she finds the animated working of a default address, and traces an implicit appeal to the lost maternal or, indeed, to the irrecoverable conditions of language itself. This text weaves its reader into a fine web of writing from which one wants no escape.

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal809/.93353

SynopsisCharles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Plath make up the odd trio on which this book is based. It is in the surprising and revealing links between them--links pertaining to troublesome mothers, elusive foreign languages, and professional disappointments--that Barbara Johnson maps the coordinates of her larger claims about the ideal of oneness in every area of life, and about the damage done by this ideal. The existence of sexual difference precludes an original or ultimate "one" who would represent all of mankind; the plurality of languages makes it impossible to think that one doesn't live in translation; and the plurality of the sexes means that every human being came from a woman's body, and some will reproduce this feat, while others won't. In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer., In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

LC Classification NumberPN56.S52J64 2003