2,147 research outputs found
The good parodist: beyond images of escape in the fiction of Doris lessing
No full textIn her earlier fiction, Doris Leasing presents images of escape from what Cohen and Taylor term "everyday life”. These images of escape, such as the vision of the "noble city, set four-square" in Martha Quest and Martha's plunge into the muddy veld pothole in A Proper Marriage, are framed by realism. In positing an escape from 'realism'(understood as both literary form and "everyday reality") they suggest the inadequacy of realism. However, the success of these images is limited as they attempt to posit an "outside", a project which postmodernism has taught us, is bound to fail. Lessing increasingly replaces these images of escape with parody. Parody more fundamentally interrogates realism and allows Lessing to negotiate an escape whilst recognizing her implication in contemporary society. My model of parody takes its lead from Linda Hutcheon's consideration of "serious parody", as marking "the intersection of creation and re-creation, of invention and critique" (A Theory of Parody, 1985). This, I argue, is the intersection of Lessing's political and aesthetic projects. Lessing's use of parody also provides her with a useful strategy for negotiating subjectivity. I argue that whilst she questions the liberal humanist self, she does not completely reject it. She is "post-humanist" rather than "anti-humanist". Lessing's "space fiction" seems to signal a return to the project of positing an "outside" implied by her images of escape. However, I illustrate how her space fiction is equally subject to the problematic politics of parody. Just as parody "installs" a pre-existing text to "subvert" it, so space fiction "installs" the Earth in order to critique it. The "dual-codedness" of parody is, I conclude, perfect for Lessing's multiple projects
Citation de Doris Lessing : Un homme et deux femmes, Plon
No full textLessing Doris. Citation de Doris Lessing : Un homme et deux femmes, Plon. In: Sorcières : les femmes vivent, n°24, 1982. Mythes et nostalgies. p. 33
Citation de Doris Lessing : Un homme et deux femmes, Plon
No full textLessing Doris. Citation de Doris Lessing : Un homme et deux femmes, Plon. In: Sorcières : les femmes vivent, n°24, 1982. Mythes et nostalgies. p. 33
The mother-daughter conflict in selected works by Doris Lessing
No full textBibliography: leaves 166-180.The central characters in Doris Lessing's novels are usually women struggling to shape for themselves a new and authentic identity in a changing world. In this study it is argued that this quest involves the Lessing character in a conflict less with any man than with another woman. This woman is the mother. The younger woman's task is to resist the compulsion to become like her mother and so lead a narrow, entirely domesticated life. The theme of the mother-daughter conflict is given its first extensive examination in this study. Three of Lessing's works are analysed in detail, while brief reference is made to nearly all of her novels and some African short stories. The three works selected, The Grass is Singing (1950), "To Room Nineteen" (1963), and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), mark the beginning, an approximate mid-point, and the conclusion of the theme under discussion. They are also works that have not, as yet, enjoyed the exhaustive critical attention given to the Children of Violence series and The Golden Notebook
Writing for Balance: A Conversation with Doris Lessing
No full textEarl G. Ingersoll has edited a collection of interviews with Doris Lessing, which OR Press will be publishing this spring. He teaches at SUNY College in Brockport, New York. Doris Lessing has published over 30 books, most recently African Laughter and The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, both from HarperCollins 1992. She lives in London
A sense of place in selected African works by Doris Lessing read in conjunction with novels of education by contemporary white South African women writers
No full textBibliography: leaves 211-217.This study provides a more intensive reading of certain works by Doris Lessing set in Southern Africa than has yet been attempted, and reads them,• for the first time, in conjunction with a particular literary lineage within Southern African letters, the novel of education by white women. The works by Lessing chosen for discussion are: two short stories, "The Old Chief Mshlanga" (1951) and "Sunrise on the Veld" (1951), the first two volumes of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), and Lessing's autobiographical account of a return visit to Rhodesia in 1956, Going Home (1957). Those by the other Southern African women writers--all of which, with the exception of Gordimer's The Lying Days have received virtually no critical attention to date--are: Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953)', Jillian Becker's The Virgins• (1976), Carolyn Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), E.M. / MacPhail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Menan du Plessis's A State of Fear (1983)
Food and eating in fiction since 1950 with particular reference to the writing of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis.
No full textPhDEating is a fundamental activity. What people eat, how and with whom, what
they feel about food, what they do or do not want to eat and why - even who
they eat - are of crucial significance in any reading of human behaviour.
In this thesis, I consider the diverse and complex uses of food and eating
in fiction since 1950, especially that written by women. I argue both that food
and eating carry much of the meaning of a novel or story and that the acts of
cooking, feeding and eating depicted are inseparable from issues of power and
control: individually, interpersonally, culturally, politically.
My discussion centres on the writing of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing,
Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory,
sociology, anthropology, Foucault, Bakhtin and others, the thesis aims to
construct an interdisciplinary perspective which both resists reductive
interpretations and emphasises the centrality, complexity and diversity of food
and eating in literature in our culture.
I begin with an examination of the ambiguities of maternal feeding and
nurturing, moving on to explore the links between appetite, eating and sexuality.
I explore cannibalism and vampirism as manifestations of oppression, but also as
indicating insatiable emptiness and transgressive appetite. The body itself is
crucial, and my argument considers the paradox of not eating as
control/enslavement, also tracing self-starvation as a positive route towards
wholeness and connection. The last part of my argument focuses on social
eating, examining conventions, rituals and food itself in connection with power
relations, and finally considers how we might truly speak of food and eating in
the context of society as a whole
Author Doris Lessing
No full textDoris Lessing was the keynote speaker on Opening day of the National Word Festival 198
Doris Lessing
No full textprofilo bio-bibliografico della scrittrice inglese Doris Lessing, premio Nobel per la Letteratura nel 200
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