Tania Modleski

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Tania Modleski (born 1949) is an American feminist scholar and cultural critic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, "to begin a feminist analysis of women's reading", considered three popular fictional genres: the Harlequin romance, the Gothic novel and the daytime US soap opera. [1] Modleski argued that the formulaic nature of these genres gave readers the freedom to construct their own response, at a distance from the text. Her next book, The Women Who Knew Too Much, examined seven Hitchcock films: Blackmail , Murder , Rebecca , Notorious , Rear Window , Vertigo and Frenzy . Modelski now challenged the terms of taking 'distance' from a text, arguing that "the desire for distance itself [is] ... bound up with the male's insistence on his difference from woman." By contrast to male violence, the 'feminine' could embrace "narrative empathy, spectatorial passivity, and the subconscious imaginary". [2]

In Feminism Without Women, Modleski argued that "male power frequently works to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity", and that the writer has a responsibility to re-articulate women's shared experience. [2]

Works

References

  1. Clancy, Kim (2003). "Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women". In Barker, Martin; Beezer, Anne (eds.). Reading Into Cultural Studies. Routledge. pp. 122–136. ISBN   978-1-134-92285-7.
  2. 1 2 Draper, Ellen (2009). "Modleski, Tania". In Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. Routledge. pp. 377–8. ISBN   978-1-135-22129-4.