Penelope at Work

This chapter considers Penelope in order to give a name to what is at work in a text like A Room of One's Own, although the phrase 'at work' already covers up in too purposeful a fashion the way in which such work entails as well its own undoing. It explores Penelope as a shuttling figure in power's household, one whose movement between outside and inside, violence and poetry, the work of history and the unworking of fiction may allow us to frame one or two notions about the place of woman's art. Peggy Kamuf looks in at Virginia Woolf's stagings of the interruption and exclusion practised upon women in A Room, Michel Foucault makes a passing appearance to break in upon, and break down, the imaginary coherence of a Western philosophical subject. But there is something tenaciously and traditionally single-minded in Foucault's style of argument, which works in a more systematic mode than that of the women's indirect strategies

Architectural engineering · Classical Antiquity Studies · Engineering · History · Mechanical Engineering

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