Welcome to winter quarter!

Because, as we know, winter quarter is the favorite quarter of all good University of Chicago graduates…

Please join us on Monday, January 3-5p in Wieboldt 206 for our first workshop of the winter term.

Barbara Straumann presents her book proposal for:

“A Voice of Her Own? Female Performers in Narrative Fiction.”

The proposal & a password for downloading it will be available next Monday.

Don’t have a password? Not on our list? Wha?! Just email us: tapsworkshop.uofc@gmail.com!


In this workshop session Dr. Straumann will discuss a work-in-progress, a book project in which she explores issues raised by the appearance of female performer figures – actresses, singers, preachers and speakers – in British and American narrative fiction, c.1850-1930. The striking abundance of female performers in the literary production of the time bespeaks a paradoxical fascination with the feminine voice performing in public. By stressing this largely neglected, yet culturally resonant tradition of public articulation, the project partly seeks to revise the conjunction of femininity, death, silence and hysteria often emphasized in gender studies. At the same time, the present project is conceived as a discussion of theoretical questions pertaining to voice. In the recent debate of the so-called “performative turn,” as Straumann argues, issues of voice have received remarkable critical attention in philosophy, theatre and media studies. They are, however, only rarely discussed in the field of literature. Straumann seeks to counter this lacuna by conceptualizing voice as a fruitful category for the analysis of narrative texts. Given that there can be no concrete voice in narrative fiction, what are the aesthetic means that produce what might be called “voice effects”? How do narrative texts evoke virtually what escapes them medially?

Dr. Barbara Straumann teaches at the English Department of the University of Zurich and is spending the academic year 2009/2010 as a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago and as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in the School of Advanced at the University of London. Her research interests include literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, gender, film and visuality. She is the co-author of Die Diva: Eine Geschichte der Bewunderung (Schirmer/Mosel, 2002) and the author of Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov (Edinburgh UP, 2008) as well as a number of articles on masculinity, celebrity culture, Germaine de Staël, Henry James, Willa Cather and Isak Dinesen. She is currently working on a monograph on female performer voices in British and American nineteenth and twentieth-century narrative fiction and another book project tracing the cultural afterlife of Queen Elizabeth I.


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