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Title: Silences by Jack Olsen ISBN: 0-440-55011-4 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 15 April, 1979 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: How circumstances affect the creation of literature
Comment: This scholarly exploration of how silence is imposed on the literary writing of those people hampered by gender, class, religion, or ethnicity was first published in 1978 and has recently been reissues with a new preface. Olsen speaks of the obstacles and frustrations faced when women and other disenfranchised people are driven to put words to paper. The fact that Olsen took 15 years to write this book, squeezing bits of time between working and mothering, goes a long way toward demonstrating exactly what she's talking about.
Rating: 5
Summary: Why aren't you writing?
Comment: Silences by Tillie Olsen
Annotated Bibliography
This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity. It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable. Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go. Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class. Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time. It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them. Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman. There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother's sacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business. Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world. Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production. This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose.
Rating: 5
Summary: a way to get the book
Comment: It is an embarassment that this title is out of print. As a woman, mother, writer, I am reading it now + find it to be an important tool. SO here is my suggestion for obtaining a copy, which may be awful but nonetheless it is how I got my copy: I borrowed it from the library and then told them I lost it + then I paid for it.
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Title: Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen ISBN: 0385290101 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 15 July, 1971 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, Mary Gordon ISBN: 0156787334 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: December, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 by Adrienne Cecile Rich ISBN: 0393312852 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories by Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen ISBN: 0935312390 Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY Pub. Date: October, 1985 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp ISBN: 0743235266 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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