Synopses & Reviews
Rousseau's writings reflect paradoxes and apparent inconsistencies with his principled commitments to freedom and equality. In this engrossing work, Penny Weiss wrestles with issues of gender in the works of Rousseau.
Weiss attempts to resolve apparent inconsistencies by placing them within the context of Rousseau's political philosophy, while avoiding the impulse to attribute his remarks on the sexes to the sexist times in which he wrote, or to his personal idiosyncracies.
A significant contribution to feminist theory, this book addresses the debates concerning Rousseau's understandings of gender, justice, freedom, community, and equality. She also examines how Rousseau's political strategies give rise to a range of important contemporary questions regarding families, citizens, and communities.
This new, more complete picture of Rousseau's work will challenge scholars and students of philosophy, politics, and women's studies to look at, and understand, Rousseau in a whole new way. Penny A. Weiss addresses the apparent male/female contradictions that run through the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She argues that Rousseau's defense of sexual differentiation is based on the contribution he perceives it can make to the establishment of community, not on an appeal to some version of natural sex differences. Weiss convincingly demonstrates that Rousseau's political strategy is ultimately unworkable, undermining the very community it was meant to establish.
Review
"A harrowing first novel...Svoboda's heroine is a white ethnographer slowly being starved to death by her lover as they trek across the Sudan. An obsessive monologue told in a measured whisper, desperate, chilling, seductive."
"I am still hungover from reading this book . . . Most writers cannot sustain their premises but Svoboda does and even strengthens hers . . . I am very excited about this book being put into the world."
"Like another poet-turned novelist, Denis Johnson, Svoboda turns a shrewd and lucid gaze on sights that make others turn away. Her diction is as precise as her territory is vast. What happens in Africa haunts her, it inhabits every word."
Review
"Clear, rich, and coherent, the book succeeds splendidly."-Choice,
Review
"In a thoughtful, lucid and graceful book, Penny Weiss shows how Rousseau's attempt to combine a sexual division of labor with a communitarian politics—as good a try as there ever was—cannot succeed. Weiss offers a convincing feminist reading of Rousseau, one that genuinely gives the other side of the gender equality argument, Rousseau's side, its due."-Jane Bennett,Goucher College
Review
"Like another poet-turned novelist, Denis Johnson, Svoboda turns a shrewd and lucid gaze on sights that make others turn away. Her diction is as precise as her territory is vast. What happens in Africa haunts her, it inhabits every word."-Amy Hempel,
Synopsis
Cannibal is Africa from the insideinside the head of a woman who fears that the man she loves is CIA, that the film the're supposed to make is his cover, that she might be pregnant. A haunting story of survival, Cannibal lays bare a woman's greatest hungers. Known as Good-for-Nothing by the Africans unfit for the climate, the work, or frienship, she struggles for recognition, and for her life. What she finds, wandering the savannah for months, are the "blue people", those with AIDS who have been left to die in an abandoned British outpost. But this is only counterpoint to her own predicament. "Trust hasn't enough syllables," she says, regarding her lover walking ahead of her. "He doesn't look at it. I can't not look, but he won't look." In Cannibal, nobody wants to lookthe differences are too frightening, the truth too stark, the love too little. A step beyond Heart of Darkness, Cannibal is the virtual reality of exotic paranoia where, when the images break apart, Death grins out.
Synopsis
Cannibal is Africa from the insideinside the head of a woman who fears that the man she loves is CIA, that the film the're supposed to make is his cover, that she might be pregnant. A haunting story of survival, Cannibal lays bare a woman's greatest hungers. Known as Good-for-Nothing by the Africans unfit for the climate, the work, or frienship, she struggles for recognition, and for her life. What she finds, wandering the savannah for months, are the "blue people", those with AIDS who have been left to die in an abandoned British outpost. But this is only counterpoint to her own predicament. "Trust hasn't enough syllables," she says, regarding her lover walking ahead of her. "He doesn't look at it. I can't not look, but he won't look." In Cannibal, nobody wants to lookthe differences are too frightening, the truth too stark, the love too little. A step beyond Heart of Darkness, Cannibal is the virtual reality of exotic paranoia where, when the images break apart, Death grins out.
About the Author
A native of Nebraska, Terese Svoboda lived for a year in Sudan, making documentary films and translating. She now divides her time between New York and Hawaii.