Produktive Differenz. Leserinnen treten aus dem weiblichen Spiegelbild

Konejung, Silke. Produktive Leserinnen treten aus dem weiblichen Spiegelbild. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1998. 160 pp. paperback. Konejung's book, a revised dissertation, examines the question of why poetry by women authors continues to be central to women's self-definition of their identities. The way that women readers relate to poetry by female authors, Konejung argues, tends to be mostly a transferential one of identification that is characterized by a desire to find oneself in the characters or authors. She complicates this position, though, by taking into account two further questions to which it gives rise. First, can this expectation of identification be unproblematically upheld in a critical practice of interpretation? Second, what are its implications for the status of aesthetics and femininity? Taking these questions as a point of departure, Konejung offers a reformulation of an identification-based female interpretive practice by combining the holistic approach of Gestalttherapie with the ethics of difference pedagogy of the Italian feminist authors' group Liberia delle donne di Milano. Konejung is primarily interested in the ways in which a formalist aesthetic of poetry opens up feminist interpretations, rather than in examining the status of femininity within the history of aesthetics. Konejung understands the process of aesthetic reception as an experience of the senses and claims that the formal qualities of poetry are not intrinsically gendered, but only become gendered in the process of reception. Drawing on her extensive experience directing all-women poetry workshops, Konejung emphasizes the productive link between practices of interpretation and the possibility of articulating new modes of female agency. For her, the challenge for a feminist practice of interpreting poetry lies in enabling women readers to step outside of the mirror image of themselves that they tend to create because of their transferential relationship with the text. Konejung refers to women's reassessment of their desire for identification with the text and to the possibility of emancipatory relationships among workshop participants as an experience of produktive Differenz. By realizing that their autobiographical experiences were not identical with the representations of femininity in the poems and by articulating this difference, Konejung reports that female readers were able to gain insight into the ways in which they already had--or by this process were enabled-to move beyond restrictive definitions of femininity in the realm of the interpersonal and the social. The originality of Konejung's contribution to a feminist practice of interpreting poetry lies in her efforts to save the category of experience while attempting, at the same time, not to fall back into an essentializing discourse of identity according to which the poetic text would ultimately just become an extension of the reader's autobiography

Art · German Literature and Culture Studies · Linguistic Education and Pedagogy · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy