English Faculty Publications

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2007

Publication Source

Gender After Lyotard

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to articulate how two key feminist writers, Marguerite Duras and Luce lrigaray, engage and rewrite Lyotard's interest in the sublime as a feminist aesthetic category. Jean-François Lyotard was at the vanguard of a retrieval of the category of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theory. A trenchantly polymorphous philosopher, he wrote of the sublime in a range of styles that rivals the old masters of aesthetics, who not only mastered the thought, but were themselves sublime in their works. Whereas the tradition of aesthetics almost unequivocally aligns the sublime with the masculine and the feminine with beauty, lrigaray and Duras invent a feminist sublime that seeks to be a source of resistance and transformation of oppressive and repressive elements of Occidental aesthetics and politics.

Inclusive pages

171-183

ISBN/ISSN

978-0-7914-6955-2

Document Version

Published Version

Comments

From Gender After Lyotard by Margaret Grebowicz. Chapter 11 is made available for download with permission pending from the publisher.

Permission documentation is on file.

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Place of Publication

Albany, NY


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