Re-Vision
- Paige
- Aug 25, 2018
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 26, 2018
What is Adrienne Rich suggesting about the literary canon in "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision?" How does she define re-vision and connect it to survival? on Rich's reflection on Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own (1929).
Recently, Alisa Valdes wrote about Junot Diaz's mistreatment of her. On her blog she recalls an email from him in which told her that the girls in his classes liked her books."
"Girls.
Girls like my books. Girls in his classes like my books. Not the guys, of course, because he’d never, you know, tell anyone about my books. Just girls read me.
But the world – the WORLD – likes his books.
Of course.
I was pissed.
I was pissed that the New York literary establishment coddled this vindictive, woman-hating machista writer, allowed him a high profile, sanctimonious podium from which to present himself to the world as some sort of grand liberal with a bleeding heart for injustice, a profound voice we should all listen to.
I was also pissed off that the Pulitzer committee rewarded Diaz with a prize for a book that, in many ways, wasn’t that different from my own debut novel.
I was pissed because I knew the same committee would never even consider a “chica lit” book for the prize, no matter how well written, because my writing did not adhere enough to the “downtrodden immigrant” paradigm so beloved by white liberals. I wondered whether Diaz, with his ponderous headshots and highbrow writeups, had ever been told by another literary writer, as I was, that I, Alisa, was “everything that’s wrong with publishing today,” even though that writer had never read a single word I’d written. “How do you know I’m what’s wrong with publishing if you haven’t read me?” I asked. He scoffed. “I don’t have to. Look at the titles and the covers. Garbage.”
So that’s what I was. Though I had been nominated for the Pulitzer in features as a newspaper writer, as a novelist, in Diaz’s world, I had now somehow been downgraded to someone who clearly wrote garbage, for girls."
(https://oshuncreative.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/i-tried-to-warn-you-about-junot-diaz/)
How might this author's comments about her craft be connected to Rich's ideas of re-vision? How often is work by women and for women delegitimized or marketed as less serious, less impactful, less important...
Mike McLaughlin Section 0006
Adrienne Rich is suggesting that the conscious of our society has been asleep on our equal rights. The idea is that the women of our society are waking up to realize their full potential and that the signs of an "awakening consciousness" are affecting millions of lives. The literary cannon of "When We Dead Awaken" is taken into account as an allegory for what will happen when the oppressed women (the dead) wake up and fight oppression. The oppression she mentions in her writing is both about " the sexual class system" and "sexual lives" connected to "political institutions." She defines revision as "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an…
Work by women is delegitimized because the public market often markets it as less serious, claiming that the emotions of women interfere with their work, making it less valuable. Although the acknowledgment of women's work has come a long way, as before it was merely ignored whereas now it is seen but undervalued, there is still a long way for it to come. Rich refers to this as she discusses how society is male-dominated. Rich uses her idea of revision, which she defines as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,” to criticize the literary canon and express our need to diversify it.
Vendela Conley (sect. 0004)
In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as a Re-vision” Adrienne Rich begins to explain that revision is “renaming of the various aspects of women which have been distorted by a male point of view”. Given that you can revise an old text to be newer and more understanding to your audience. Rich is suggesting that women’s literary work has always been seen as less than a mans, and that not until recently have people stood up and spoke out about this issue. Rich suggests that there is a new form of writing that is free from haunting male gaze and for women to rise above and to change the way we are viewed. She suggests that…
In this article, Adrienne Rich observes Virginia Woolf’s leanings and then choices within “A Room of One’s Own” and gives her own opinions on what Woolf’s decisions were and how it relates to having a common of interest in women writers. She explains how woman's literary work has not been as noticed and seen compared to mens work. The work only gets noticed when woman speak about their work in confidence and their opinions on it. Adrienne Rich explains that she defines re-vision by basically looking back at old texts and bring them back by making them improved. Rich mentions in the text "Men have never written for woman, but woman have written for men." This states that this wou…