While reading the Marchessault, I'm not gonna lie, I found myself a bit confused at times. Hopefully tomorrow's discussions will point me to a clear interpretation. However, I found the reading interesting and many of the key elements Marchessault noted really stuck in my head (particularly the connection between many white males denying authorship was when marginalized people who had historically not received complete authority to authorship.) So like some of the other blogs, I'm going to focus on the part that seemed most coherent and interesting to me. On page 86 Marchessault states "In opposition to Barthes' dead author, the lack of authority that women writers encounter is not celebrated but healed and overcome through political community. The communication of experiences particular to women's lives is precisely what should constitute women's writing, forging a path for a new unity of women readers and writers that redefines the universal."

Although the bit about Fruedian psychoanalysis and the relation of authorship and imagination to the Oedipal drive probably got me the most riled up out of anything in the Marchessault reading, I feel that anything I would try to say about it would only come out as angry Frued-bashing babel, which, while satisfying, is not very productive.

Instead I will turn my attention to a passage that interested (rather than angered) me. It has long been my primary critique of second-wave feminism that it has a tendency to essentialize and polarize along the lines the two-gender system as badly as the patriarchal establishment does. Granted for different purposes and with different intents, but, as we discussed in relation to the Barthes, purpose and intent are only important to the degree that they are succesfully communicated. Therefore, despite all intents toward empowerment through solidarity, I continue to take issue with the way in which many second-wave feminists seem to presuppose a two-gender system in which all individuals identify wholly and completely with one or the other category and who's self-catagorization will inherently link up with their social catagorization.

But back to the reading....

The article was like searching for a needle in a haystack for something I could piece into a cohesive thought. Not sure I'm really there yet, but here is what's going through my mind so far: Rita Felski says that it is imperitive that the female work of art not be divorced from its context of reception and neither can the author be separated from the reader. This is in direct opposition to the idea that there is power in such a separation for the authors mentioned by Barthe, (Balzac, Malarme, Proust). It is so true that only those who have power can afford to play at not having it. I do think that women are second in power to the male dominated society but the language used throughout this article is overly strong in regards to the current reception of women as authors.

Reading Janine Marchessault’s “Is the Dead Author A Woman“, there was an excerpt that really stood out for me in defining authorship in relations with women. Marchessault writes, “If there is a resistance to feminism on the part of some women, a desire not to identify, and a desire not to identify with women, it is perhaps because a history, without memory, continues to divide us negatively” (Marchessault 88). A “history without memory” is no history at all, especially when it concerns a collective identity where memory is the cornerstone of defining that identity. In the case of women’s authorship, this lack of history leads to a dissipation of influence, authority, and control of women’s identity as authors that instead of bringing about a powerful source of affirmation of women author’s collective identity both socially and politically, “continues to divide… negatively.”