Dr. Annette Kolodny, 1941–2019

I was first inspired by Dr. Annette Kolodny upon reading her influential 1980 essay "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism" as a first-year master's student in a feminist theory seminar. In preparation for writing this tribute to Annette, who would later co-direct my PhD dissertation, I reread the essay, again turning to its reprint appearance in the same well-worn edition of Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism we were assigned in that seminar and that I still reach for today when I teach feminist critical approaches. Seeing my annotations and marginalia from twenty years ago brought me back to my early journey as a feminist scholar, energized by Annette's bold statements that "[l]iterary history (and, with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction" and "insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms" ("Dancing" 176). Even before I could imagine the shape my research might take, these words ensured that as a young scholar I would not have to justify a dissertation or a scholarly career based on the study and teaching of American women writers and feminist critical approaches. I did not have to dance through the minefield; I just got to dance!

A few years later, in 2003, I met Annette when I took her graduate seminar on the literature and theory of the American frontiers as a doctoral student at the University of Arizona.¹ The course was centered on her 1992 essay "Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions," which expands the origins of American literary history beyond "European colonial beginnings" with the aim that "no ethnic, racial, or cultural enclave, and no political or scholarly party could ever again take control" of what she envisioned as a more inclusive and diverse US literary canon ("Letting Go" 2, 15). The syllabus opened with the thirteenth-century Vinland Sagas' portrayals of first contact between the Native peoples of the Americas and Viking explorers in Greenland. We also read Puritan texts such as Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, a gesture toward Annette's training as a scholar of early American literature and her commitment to the recovery of the lost women's voices in American literary history. In lecture and class discussion, Annette modeled feminist ecocritical readings of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! The syllabus integrated American Indian literatures such as Handsome Lake's "How America Was Discovered" (Seneca) and excerpts from Joseph Nicolar's 1893 Life and Traditions of the Red Man (Penobscot), which Annette would later restore to print.²

While I signed up for Annette's seminar because of my interest in western American literature and feminist critical approaches, other graduate students were there because of her reputation in feminist ecocriticism, and still others for her contributions to the field of early American literature. Some students registered for the class because of her commitment to teaching American Indian literatures and her social and political activism. All of us were inspired by Annette's insistence that literature and literary criticism matter and that these "ideas are important because they determine the ways we live, or want to live" ("Dancing" 186). My graduate student colleagues in Annette's frontiers course eventually went on to have careers in and make significant scholarly and pedagogical contributions to the fields of early American literature, American Indian literature, American women writers, frontier studies, ecocriticism, western American literature, and women's and gender studies. The range of her students' specializations and career paths is a testament to Annette's own scholarly acumen and diversity, and, certainly, her commitment to mentoring the next generation of the profession's scholars and teachers.

As a leading early feminist literary critic, Annette embodied the second-wave adage that the "personal is political." Her personal commitments and passions influenced her scholarship and research, just as the conditions and structures of academia, in turn, shaped her life and career. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s she was active...