From the Editor: Remembering Shari Benstock

This issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature is dedicated to the memory of Shari Benstock, who died this past spring. An eminent scholar of modernist literature, women’s writing, and feminist theory, she edited the journal from 1983 through 1986. Her publications are many and diverse, but she is best known for her magisterial study Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940, published in the year she left the University of Tulsa for the University of Miami. Summarizing the nature and significance of this book is a task to which I feel unequal, at least without resorting to recycling the praises that have accrued over the almost three decades since its first reviews appeared. I will only report from a more personal perspective that this book is one of perhaps a dozen publications that stand out in my memory as framing my own entry into the field, even though I am not a modernist. When I started graduate school in 1992, the book seemed to be in everyone’s hands and on everyone’s shelf or desk. Few discussions of modernism proceeded without reference to it nor could much discussion of women’s literary history. My own sense of the book’s accomplishment was that in an era thick with the smoke and shrapnel of theory skirmishes and canon wars—the scholarly atmosphere of the 1980s—she completed a feminist revision of the modernist canon even as she exposed the masculinist terms by which modernism was defined. This confrontation with how the “working definitions of Modernism—its aesthetics, politics, critical principles, and poetic practices—and the prevailing interpretations of the Modernist experience had excluded women from its concerns” had influence far beyond the bounds of modernist study, as did her sustained exploration of the diverse ways by which the experience of being female could shape the content and process of writing.¹

Less well known than Women of the Left Bank are the seven prefaces Benstock wrote to the eight issues (including one double issue) of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature published under her editorship. I returned to those prefaces on the day I learned of her death out of a desire to reconnect with this particular chapter of her life and to appreciate more fully her particular influence on the journal. As was my reaction when I first read them many years ago, I was startled with their brilliance; sharp-edged, graceful, and brave, they are simultaneously inspiring and intimidating to one who would walk in the path she forged as feminist literary scholar and Editor of this journal.

Written in the years immediately preceding and coinciding with the publication of Women of the Left Bank, the prefaces are intimately connected to this study. When she introduced herself to her readers as the journal’s new Editor in Spring 1983, she mentioned the project.² Succeeding prefaces show her at work on the book, sometimes explicitly, as when in “Beyond the Reaches of Feminist Criticism: A Letter from Paris,” the preface to the Spring/Fall 1984 double issue, Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, she describes herself walking through the streets of Paris and then researching in the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet.³ The map of women authors, editors, and publishers from Paris’s early twentieth century seems to be superimposed on her walk through the city, her looking out the window of the library while she contemplates “Natalie Clifford Barney, whose house on the rue Jacob was a meeting place for French and American literati” or, of course, Gertrude Stein (p. 5). “Why is Gertrude Stein not a Modernist, not even a failed one?” Benstock asks (p. 14). The answer lay in Stein’s approach to language, her disbelief “in the indestructible relation between the word and its meaning,” a disbelief that linked her to later twentieth-century deconstructionist views of language even as it mandated a cracking open of a monolithic understanding of modernism (p. 14). At other times the connection between the prefaces and Women of the Left Bank is more implicit yet no less close, with the prefaces operating as...