What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

By Shoshana Felman and Professor Shoshana Felman

Book Overview

'What does a woman want?'--the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte--is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080184620X
• ISBN13: 9780801846205
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher