“‘That New Free Woman with Novel Inside.’” Indiana University Press Blog. 5 October 2016. (original) (raw)
Related papers
While late-Victorians associated bicycles with male riders and masculinity, James Joyce counters Victorian conventions in Finnegans Wake and captures the subversive potential of the bicycle to empower women with a new brand of feminine sexuality that recalls characteristics of the late-Victorian "New Woman." Rather than condemn these female cyclists, Joyce's narrative admires them and shows that women can be both skilled bicyclists on the road and, in a metaphorical sense, biological cyclists (through menstruation and childbearing) that physically enact a self-propulsion similar to cyclists. As these actual and metaphorical cyclists propel through various terrains and biological sequences, they simultaneously author(ize) their own personal narratives and, in doing so, the composition of all narratives involving human life. Moreover, Joyce's female cyclist is not only a figure of liberated female sexuality but also a figure of the artist herself.
Gender Trouble in Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”
Gender Studies, 2016
Although the Victorian period was a time when the sexes were assigned distinct and complementary roles, these rigid gender-role divisions between the two sexes were beginning to dissolve as the nineteenth century was drawing to its close. Among the various factors that contributed to bringing the two genders closer was the cycling boom of the 1890s, and the first-wave feminists embraced the bicycle as a freedom machine and symbol of emancipation. Despite the fact, though, that cycling functioned at first as a gender equaliser, , it eventually segregated the sexes, as social norms promoted the idea of gendered cycling and enforced a model of domesticated or feminised cycling for women. This essay aims to explore how Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1895 story “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” reflects this complicated impact that cycling had on gender segregation and the possibilities it offered for gender fusion as well as the alternative expressions of sexuality it enabled.
Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature and Film, University of Nebraska Press, 2016
This paper examines the ways in which Beckett and O’Brien, as Irish authors unraveling a larger imperial narrative, make use of the motif of the bicycle as means to embody a post-humanist approach to literary creation. As a moving image of the text’s own auto-production, the figure of the bicycle evokes the way in which, for Beckett and O’Brien, writing itself demands, to use O’Brien’s words, a kind of “atomization” or becoming Other of the author, a becoming technology.
Writing the bicycle: women, rhetoric, and technology in late nineteenth-century America
2009
Writing the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Under the direction of Jane Danielewicz and Jordynn Jack) This project examines the intersections among rhetoric, gender, and technology, examining in particular the ways that American women appropriated the new technology of the bicycle at the turn of the twentieth century. It asks: how are technologies shaped by discourse that emanates both from within and beyond professional boundaries? In what ways do technologies, in turn, reshape the social networks in which they emerge-making available new arguments and rendering others less persuasive? And to what extent are these arguments furthered by the changed conditions of embodiment and materiality that new technologies often initiate? Writing the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric and Technology in Late Nineteenth-Century America addresses these questions by considering how women's interactions with the bicycle allowed them to make new claims about their minds and bodies, and transformed the gender order in the process. The introduction, "Rhetoric, Gender, Technology," provides an overview of the three broad conversations to which the project primarily contributes: science and technology studies, feminist historiography, and rhetorical theory. In addition, it outlines a "techno-feminist" materialist methodology that emphasizes the material iii and rhetorical agency of users in shaping technologies beyond their initial design and distribution phases. The second chapter, "Technology and the Rhetoric of Bicycle Design," describes the context in which the bicycle craze emerged and explains how the popular "safety" model responded to users' concerns about its predecessor, the high wheeled "ordinary" bicycle. The third chapter, "Popular Magazines and the Rise of the Woman Bicyclist," offers a glimpse at a genre that generated both wider acceptance of the new technology and specific prescriptions as to how it might be useful to women. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters-titled, respectively, "Bicycling and the Invention of Women's Athletic Dress" and "The Medical Bicycle"-examine two discourses that shaped the women's bicycling phenomenon, both rhetorically and materially, and that were in turn transformed by this phenomenon: the heated issues of women's dress reform and women's health.
The 'feminine fictions' of James Joyce
1994
Typescript in Bold has been used throughout, in place o f It a lic in the texts quoted. I t has also been incorporated into the t i t l e s of books and a rtic le s which include the t it le s of others' works. This is to avoid confusion, as the works of dames doyce, c r itic a l works, and the t it le s of journals are underlined. 8 NOTES 1. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen in Signs:Women and Gender, edited by Elizabeth and Emily Abel, 1977; p .279. 2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1959 and 1982; p .149. 3. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .629. 4. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it; p.629. 5. Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text London harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; p .2. 6. "...a s he pointedly told Mary Col urn la te r, 'I hate in te lle c tu a l women1", quoted in Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .529. 7. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .634. Also quoted in Ellmann is a conversation Joyce had with Frank Budgen, where he apparently argued: "Women w rite books and paint pictures and compose and perform music. And there are some who have attained eminence in the fie ld of s c ie n tific research.. .But you have never heard of a woman who was the author of a complete philosophic system, and I don't think you ever w ill" c f.o p .c it.; p .634. 8. Both Richard Ellmann and Brenda Maddox chart the financial and lite ra ry support given to Joyce by these women. In her role as his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver was to give Joyce not only regular amounts o f money to pay fo r se ria liza tio n of his work (Ellmann, p.404; Maddox, p .223), but also helped to supplement his small income and help support his young fam ily. Her g ifts by 1923 had reached the to ta l of £2100 (Ellmann, p .556). She became a supportive friend to Nora too (Maddox, pp.198-199), and la te r she was to continue to support Joyce over Finnegans Wake, when many doubted the project (Ellmann, p .669). On his death, she paid fo r his funeral (Ellmann, p.481). Sylvia Beach, a friend of H arriet Shaw Weaver's, published the f i r s t edition of Ulysses through her Paris bookshop, "Shakespeare and Company", and although she and Joyce became estranged in la te r years, her support fo r his work remained appreciated by him (Ellmann, pp.504-505). 9. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeles, editors, Women in Joyce Urbana:University of I llin o is Press, 1982. 10. Modern Fiction Studies, edited by Ellen Carol Jones, v o l.35, no.3 Autumn 1989. 11. Brenda Maddox, c f.o p .c it.