Ethics of becoming

Next Friday, October 28 Routledge Publishers, will publish a new book in their series about Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. "An Ethics of Becoming. Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot" is the name of the book written by San Jeong Cho, professor at the Seoul National University, South Korea.

According to the publisher's summary:

In attempting to conceptualize feminine subjectivity beyond the familiar paradigm of dualism and within the parameters of ethics, this study examines the political and intellectual identity of contemporary poststructuralist feminism and its profound resonance with the nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman. Rooted in fundamental questions about the nexus between feminist theory and feminist literature, genre and gender, subjectivity and ethics, sexuality and textuality, and mimesis and politics, this book aims specifically to configure feminine subjectivity in the horizon of becoming - always incomplete, non-identarian, performative, unknowable, and thus paradoxically unbecoming - as it disseminates in a modality of alterity in novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. The close reading of major novels by these women writers illuminates the artistic density and ethical depth of their writing by demonstrating that these women writers rewrite the genealogy of subjectivity and invent their own Bildungsroman as a rich narrative vehicle for the feminine.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Marking the Feminine
Chapter 1 - The Marriage Plot and its Discontents: Choreographies of Erotic Subjectivity in Jane Austen
Chapter 2 - Scenes of Reading and Writing Scenes: The Open Secret of Writing Subjectivity in Charlotte Bronte
Chapter 3 - A Threshold of the Feminine: The Dissemination of Subjectivity in George Eliot
Conclusion - An Ethics of Becoming

Categories: Books, Scholar, Charlotte_Brontë