Margaret Fuller’s conversations: Speaking as revision and feminist resistance
Loading...
Date
2012
Authors
Advisor
Editor
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Adam Mickiewicz University
Title alternative
Abstract
Conversation as a means to social, intellectual, and spiritual self-culture was advocated during the
American Romantic period by members of the Transcendental movement. Margaret Fuller was a
transcendental conversationalist who challenged the theoretical setting and practice of selfculture,
remedied the gap in it about concepts of womanhood that were imposed by the culture of
the time and that attempted to determine women’s place in the symbolic order, and placed an
emphasis on self-knowledge, whatever the subject matter. She came to represent a rhetoric whose
aim was to foster community, moral truths, ethical actions, and feminist resistance. Fuller fully
subscribed to the idea of the revelatory power in conversation and provided women with an opportunity
to develop the intellectual rigor necessary to establish their own identities in the world:
public or private. Through her weekly conversations for Boston women, held from 1839 through
1844, she used conversation or speaking as revision to explore philosophical, aesthetic, and sociocultural
questions and supplied access to education from which women were excluded.
Description
Sponsor
Keywords
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 47.2-3 (2012), pp. 129-146