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The article deals with women and knowledge in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The novel was quite revolutionary in its time for its strong assertion of female agency and self-empowerment and a keen perception of power dynamics inherent in the definition of gender and gender roles. However considering Jane Eyre through the sole prism of a novel of emancipation only dealing with women’s rights and aspirations would be reductive. Jane Eyre’s fiery narrative is a strong plea against all forms of intersectional oppression in Victorian times despite its own unconscious bias relative to ethnicity and the colonial question notably.

This article is an introduction to Judith Butler's conception of gender: central to Butler's theory is the difference between sex and gender and the conception of gender as performance. The article also explores the impact of her work on queer theory.

Christine Froula (Northwestern University) and Sandra Gustafson (University of Notre Dame) were guest lecturers at the ENS de Lyon in May 2019 and participated in a roundtable on Literary Studies in the US today. The roundtable was moderated by Vanessa Guignery and François Specq, both Professors at the ENS.

The read-aloud book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, “retold” by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury designed for very young children may be unlikely teaching material for EFL students in French middle and senior schools. But if studied in conjunction with the video released by The Guardian in 2014 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the book, and if additional literary and artistic references are brought into the lesson plan, the teaching project may prove rewarding on many levels.

As women, we are often identified through our choice of sexual partners. When an “attractive” woman has sex with an ugly man, it is a descent into “abjection.” But why? Clearly, it is because as women, we are still believed to attain most of our identities through sexuality. In the present assimilationist climate, any non-monogamous, non-relational sexual act is read as a symptom of emotional damage. Our culture persists in believing that sex holds the magic key to a person’s identity — which is, of course, wrong — and in behaving as if female writers are uniquely charged with upholding the sacred intimacy of the sexual act.

Since the question of women’s freedom in writing, or “Why stories of transgression or women’s assertions of freedom are less tolerated than those of men?” only highlight ordinary male chauvinism (the answer to the question is undeniably related to cultural issues), I prefer to focus on the counter strategies that can be deployed in response to the insults made to women, like the one Eileen Myles describes in her introduction to I love Dick by Chris Kraus, What about Chris?: “She’s turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man.” In other words, rather than identifying the reasons for the violent reception of women’s transgressive writing, I prefer to think about the strategies that can flow from them.

I like the theoretical ideal of neutrality, of non-hierarchical thinking. I’d like to be a writer, a person, but I am not. None of this naming is my choice. I’m a woman, “still” or I’m “only a woman.” “A good, bad woman, a silly, frivolous woman, an intelligent woman, a sweet woman, a harridan, bitch, whore, a fishmonger, gossipy woman. A woman writer.” What is “a woman writer”? Does “woman” cancel or negate “writer”? Create a different form of writer? Or does “woman” as an adjective utterly change the noun “writer”? “Man writer”? Not used. “Male writer,” rarely employed. Are there “man books” being read in “man caves?” OK, I declare: I’m a woman who writes, a person who writes. But how am I read?

There are people who write from the place that they have been assigned. Some of them with rage so as to get away from it; others, by contrast, who follow the path that has been mapped out for us. There are those who would rather stay on the margin of that space, away from the feminine, off-centered, but are then dragged back to it, kicking and screaming. Their words are women's words, words that are situated. The masculine remains the universal reference. Feminine words stay in the realm of the singular, indexed to the gender of who said them.

"Beauty, Intensity, Asymmetry are born in my mouth like three goddesses ripe for veneration - far more than Identity, Gender, or Transgression, and utterly different from them. But this Beauty, of which we know only that some wish to buy but never to sell it, much less allow it to disappear or cause it to flee - nor to be the man or woman who no longer possesses anything but memories of it - is she a prescriptive goddess?"

Questions of genre and gender lie at the heart of The Secret Garden, which plays on different cultural and literary influences, and questions the ideological and social context in which it is inscribed.