Kathleen Woodward | University of Washington (original) (raw)

Kathleen Woodward

Kathleen Woodward, Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, has served as Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington since 2000. She is the author of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions (2009), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991), and At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (1980). She has published essays in the broad crossdisciplinary domains of the emotions, women and aging, and technology and culture in American Literary History, Discourse, differences, Generations, Indiana Law Journal, SubStance, Journal of Women's History, Women's Review of Books, South Atlantic Review, Studies in the Novel, and Cultural Critique. She is also the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999) and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (1980) as well as the coeditor of Memory and Desire: Aging--Literature--Psychoanalysis (1986), The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (1980), and Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (1978). From 1986-1995 she coedited Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. She is presently working on risk in the context of globalization and population aging.
Woodward has received institutional grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a member of the Steering Committee of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and of the Senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She has served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2009-2013), the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance (2003-2009), and as founding Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, a broad-based network of scholars and leaders of cultural institutions devoted to fostering the development of campus-community partnerships (2000-2005). From 1995-2001 she was President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international organization of over 160 members, and she continues to serve on its International Advisory Board. Woodward was the Director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1981-2000, where she taught in the Department of English and the interdisciplinary graduate program in Modern Studies. She has also taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and her B.A. magna cum laude in Economics from Smith College where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

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Papers by Kathleen Woodward

Age, culture, humanities, Apr 17, 2024

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2019

"I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty," writes Joan Didion in her memoir B... more "I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty," writes Joan Didion in her memoir Blue Nights, published in 2011 when she was seventy-seven (106). How might we understand this "issue" of frailty? Turning first to Didion's portrayal of her experience as an older widow who has recently lost her only child, and second, to the dominant rhetoric in the United States regarding population aging, I suggest that the all-pervasive discourse of risk provides a productive way to frame two distinct yet intersecting issues of frailty: risk in relation to the health of individuals who are old as well as risk in relation to the economic health of "advanced" nations-the United States in particular-in the context of globalization. Risk references a certain temporality; it points to the future from the perspective of the present. We are. .. at risk, and today virtually everything seems to be a risk factor-especially age itself. Among many other conditions, age is a risk factor for disability, and I will close with some thoughts about aging and disability through the lens of frailty. Aging is a "normal" process. Aging is also understood as a risk factor that, well, increases with age. Indeed, age is itself a mega-risk factor (and yet, generally, the best "outcome" is to increase our age, revealing the contradictions in the discourse itself). Associated with advanced old age, frailty is a condition of vulnerability-one, I will suggest, that can be intensified by the discourse of risk. 1 Risk underwrites, or overwrites, frailty, producing feelings of fear. Like aging and old age, frailty has a history. Over the past thirty-five years frailty has emerged as a biomedical concept, understood not as a

Duke University Press eBooks, Nov 13, 2020

We are aged by culture, as Margaret Gullette has perfectly put it, her emphasis placed on the neg... more We are aged by culture, as Margaret Gullette has perfectly put it, her emphasis placed on the negative associations sutured to being old in capitalist societies. What would it mean to be aged by trees? To grow old with trees as our companion species? To understand that "old trees are our parents," embracing the knowledge that we humans share a lineage with trees? I approach these questions through the prism of the magisterial novel The Overstory (2018) by the American writer Richard Powers, singling out three scenes that offer parables of post-human aging: first, humans humbled in comparison with trees in terms of longevity; second, a new understanding of what constitutes the genetic lifeworld of Homo sapiens; third, deep knowledge of the green world on the part of humans who have learned across their lifetimes and into their seventies to embrace the wisdom of trees. If the first scene calls up feelings of awe, including the sublime, the second engenders feelings of family and kinship across species, and the third, the consolations

Modern Language Quarterly, 2009

American Literary History, Apr 1, 1996

Being cool or looking cool is asking for humiliation, as much as it American Cool. is a defense a... more Being cool or looking cool is asking for humiliation, as much as it American Cool. is a defense against what it is asking for. ... Constructing a Twentieth-Century William Ian Miller, Humiliation Emotional Style By Peter N Stearns New York University Press, 1994

Feminist media histories, 2021

Video artist Cecelia Condit’s recent work offers a rich visual and sonic poetics of feeling, enga... more Video artist Cecelia Condit’s recent work offers a rich visual and sonic poetics of feeling, engaging multiple varieties of sensation, affect, and emotion. Drawing on Erin Manning’s theory of preacceleration, this essay provides a close reading of Condit’s beguiling Within a Stone’s Throw (2012) as an environmental piece and in the context of her other work and her life. It argues that Condit’s solitary video work in Ireland’s rocky region resulted in a feeling of freedom that not only enabled her to create Within a Stone’s Throw—part environmental artwork, part performance piece, part impersonal self-portrait—but also served as a catalyst for feminist emotion that explodes in triumph in I’ve Been Afraid (2020). Paradoxically, then, in Within a Stone’s Throw we find the emergence of “planetary affect,” a mode of being on Earth that doesn’t center human subjectivity in forceful psychological and social emotions, but does enable them.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1980

Find the secret to improve the quality of life by reading this aging and the elderly humanistic p... more Find the secret to improve the quality of life by reading this aging and the elderly humanistic perspectives in gerontology. This is a kind of book that you need now. Besides, it can be your favorite book to read after having this book. Do you ask why? Well, this is a book that has different characteristic with others. You may not need to know who the author is, how well-known the work is. As wise word, never judge the words from who speaks, but make the words as your good value to your life.

Journal of Women's History, 2001

Kathleen Woodward ethany Ladimer's impressive Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras is an outstanding cont... more Kathleen Woodward ethany Ladimer's impressive Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras is an outstanding contribution to one of our most pressing projects today: the creation of a collective feminist consciousness of the prospects and problems of older women. Sidonie-Gabriele Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras: these three extraordinary women lived long and prolific lives as influential writers. Colette, who lived to be eighty-one, died in 1954. Both Beauvoir and Duras died in 1986; Duras was eighty-one, Beauvoir seventy-eight. All three, Ladimer shows, invented ways of living into old age that were not part of the cultural script in France. Isabelle de Courtivron, also a scholar of French literature, has argued that there are significant differences between how French women and American women approach aging. "French women tend to wax poetic, fatalistic, and serene," she insists, while "Anglo-Saxon women tend to wax angry, energetic, and political." 1 Ladimer implicitly engages Courtivron's clear-cut distinction between the two cultures-French femininity and American feminism-and deliberately blurs it, concluding that the models presented by these French women and their writing are in fact feminist. Ladimer asks not only how gender affects aging but also how aging affects gender. She reads these women's lives and their work together, showing how their writing often served as a space for working through anxieties about aging and rehearsing new ways of living. She concludes that all three developed a style in their later works that reflects resolution of earlier concerns, if not obsessions. Most important, all three lived their last years neither pathetically alone nor fiercely independent but in the intimate company of others in ways that came as a welcome surprise to them. Key to their ability to draw others close was their turn to autobiography, which became a preferred genre for them. "It is this shift into a more authentic mode of self-description," Ladimer writes, "that gives autobiography a potentially more subversive role for older women than it has had for older men and may be the reason autobiography has been such a frequent practice among older women writers in all languages in the twentieth century" (44). Autobiography privileges disclosure, which reveals one's vulnerabilities and therefore, Ladimer believes, presumes a relationship of trust with the reader. Thus autobiography is seen as a

Modern Fiction Studies, 1996

Sub-stance, 1981

This collection of essays provides a theoretical perspective of the interaction between technolog... more This collection of essays provides a theoretical perspective of the interaction between technology and contemporary culture. Western society has now entered a post-industrial stage of development and the volume explores the "mystifications of postindustrial culture, and looks at theories of communication within a broad theory of culture that includes the mass media as well as art and other works of social imagination".

Sub-stance, 1989

Under the influence of Lacan, recent psychoanalytic theory in France has stressed the strict stru... more Under the influence of Lacan, recent psychoanalytic theory in France has stressed the strict structural relationship between narcissism and aggressivity. As Lacan wrote in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" (referring to the mirror stage of infancy), "This narcissistic moment in the ...

Duke University Press eBooks, May 1, 1986

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 2000

... Woodward OPENINGTHE SUBJECT The Marks of Time/Nancy K. Miller 20 34 59 88 112 Aging and the S... more ... Woodward OPENINGTHE SUBJECT The Marks of Time/Nancy K. Miller 20 34 59 88 112 Aging and the Scandal of Anachronism/Mary Russo The ... and" post-menopausal." 4 It is thus not an accident that many women around the age of fifty experience aging, an experience that ...