Rooms of Our Own

With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor. A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several decades: the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. Yet Rooms of Our Own eschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.

Table of Contents:
1. The Once and Future History of Sex and Gender; 2. "Theory " Trouble; 3. . White Like Me; 4. Global Poetics; 5. Institutionalization and Its Queer Discontents; 6. Reproduction in an Age of Mechanical Production

About the Author :
Susan Gubar, Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University, is the author of many books, including The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, coauthored with Sandra M. Gilbert.

Review :
"Spoken from the heart, Rooms of Our Own provides a powerful antidote to the pessimism so often expressed about 'feminism 'or 'the women 's movement 'or younger women 's seeming lack of interest in battles that still need to be fought. Gubar, one of the foremost pioneers, addresses these issues with elegance and wit, elucidating the multiple currents swirling around gender studies and social activism today and illustrating why they still profoundly matter. Rooms of Our Own speaks as much to the students she so lovingly depicts as to those of us who teach them." Brenda R. Silver, Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor, Dartmouth College "Rooms of Our Own w ill charm and hearten fans of Woolf 's works. Indeed, much of the delight and effectiveness of the book comes from Gubar 's deft incorporation not only of Woolf 's structure, but of her memorable turns of phrase. As an experiment, one cannot imagine this being done otherwise or better." Maria DiBattista, professor of English and comparative literature, Princeton University