Preface

PREFACE The contributions to this volume were selected from thirty-five manuscripts received during 1987 and 1988. The volume has taken longer to come together than previous ones, in part because authors, reviewers, and editors aren't always able to meet deadlines. But also, and more importantly , it appears to us that we are going through a time of reassessment and reorientation within WIG and feminist Germanistik. This is due in great part to developments within the theoretical debate on feminist scholarship and politics during the last few years. In particular, recent feminist theoretical work has underscored the need for greater complexity and critical self-reflection in feminist scholarship. At the same time, serious disagreements among feminist theorists have made it difficult to engage in that project. We discuss some implications of this situation in our contribution concluding this volume. Angelika Bammer's article "Nackte Kaiser und bärtige Frauen" is a welcome contribution to the debate on theory within feminist Germanistik. She argues persuasively that academic feminists can neither afford to remain outside of the prevailing discourses of power nor to enter them uncritically. She suggests that donning the "disguises" of academic discourses must be accompanied by a vigilant awareness of conflicting definitions of self. Through reflection on her own experiences with and without her "Bart/hes," she offers a new perspective on the possibility as well as the necessity to dismantle "the master's tools." Sabine Hake's review of the evolution of Frauen und Film shows its gradual shift in emphasis from feminist film politics to feminist film theory. While not minimizing the disagreement and dislocation this shift caused, she also argues that the original project of the journal, the attempt to create and refine a definition of "feministische Filmkritik" in a context of critical self-examination and political commitment remains its essential goal and greatest achievement. Like Angelika Bammer, who resists a reductive polarization of theory and practice, Hake refuses to affirm the terms of mutual exclusion in which the journal's editorial debates are often framed. Some of the challenges posed to feminist theory are apparent in the contributions that treat works by women writers. Dorothy Rosenberg, Susanne Kord, and Lorely French present analyses of texts by women writers IX whose widely differing sociohistorical contexts have inspired different strategies of reading. Dorothy Rosenberg examines the contributions Gabriele Eckart, Lia Pirskawetz, and Christa Wolf have made to the debate on environment and progress in the GDR and explores the links between feminism and environmentalism suggested by their works. Susanne Kord discusses the depiction of male and female rebellion against the bourgeois order in Marieluise Fleißer's early plays as a mirror of Fleißer's own dependence on her male mentors and her attempts to assert independence. Pursuing parallels between Fleißer's relationships with her mentors and characters in the dramas, she demonstrates how the male characters' assertion of identity implies the erasure of identity in the dependent female characters who fade from the scene. Lorely French catalogs the challenges to patriarchal norms in the correspondence of the nineteenth-century writers Karoline von Giinderrode, Sophie Mereau, and Rahel Varnhagen and describes their efforts to define a new epistolary aesthetic. She suggests that their concern for authenticity enabled them to go beyond imitation of male discourse to invent strategies for expressing the contradictions, ambiguities, and complexities they perceived as essential to their identities. Unequal power relations between women and men are also the focus of Sarah Westphal-WihFs analysis of three versions of a Middle High German tale. Using a theoretical framework derived from contemporary sociolinguistic research, she looks at the representation of power and solidarity within the family as encoded in pronouns of direct address. Her analysis suggests that the use of du and ihr in medieval times was more complicated than previous linguistic research has assumed. Susanne Zantop and Jeannine Blackwell's contribution responds to the need for basic bibliographic research for teaching and scholarship. Their bibliography on German social history and women writers provides a useful tool for those interested in the sociohistoric conditions that shaped women's writing from the Middle Ages to 1848. The bibliography shows that much work has...