Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook After Fifty

Transcription

1 Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook After Fifty

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3 Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook After Fifty Edited by Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer

4 doris lessing s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK after fifty Copyright Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doris Lessing s The golden notebook after fifty / edited by Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Lessing, Doris, Golden notebook. I. Ridout, Alice, editor. II. Rubenstein, Roberta, 1944 editor. III. Singer, Sandra, 1957 editor. PR6023.E833G dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: May

5 In Memoriam Doris May Lessing

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7 Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors ix xi Introduction 1 Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer Part I Politics and Geopolitics 1 Across the Frontiers : Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook 13 Julie Cairnie 2 Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence 33 Mark Pedretti 3 Through That Gap the Future Might Pour : Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook 55 Cornelius Collins 4 Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden Notebook 73 Sandra Singer Part II Autobiographical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Reconsiderations 5 The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman à Clef 99 Roberta Rubenstein

8 viii Contents 6 Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon 115 Tonya Krouse 7 So Why Write Novels? The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Politics of Authorship 135 Sophia Barnes 8 Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit 153 Alice Ridout Part III Timing Is All : Personal Reminiscences 9 The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me 173 Paul Schlueter 10 I Remember Doris Lessing and Her Illimitable Novel 181 Jonah Raskin 11 Timing Is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now 195 Florence Howe 12 The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading 209 Gillian Beer Index 213

9 Acknowledgments The co-editors of this volume especially thank our contributors for their work, their professionalism in responding to our feedback, and their patience. Thanks also go to our editors at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull and Ryan Jenkins, for their enthusiasm for this project and their helpful guidance along the way; and to Susan Watkins for her perceptive reading of the manuscript and her valuable recommendations. We are grateful to Clancy Sigal and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote from unpublished materials in the Clancy Sigal Archive and to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to publish Roberta Rubenstein s chapter, adapted from her book Literary Half- Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (2014). We gratefully acknowledge permission from Gillian Beer and Taylor and Francis to republish Gillian Beer on Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook, which appeared first in Women: A Cultural Review 21.1 (2010): We thank Alice Jackson Wright for permission to quote from her poem cited in Florence Howe s chapter in this volume. Finally, we wish to express our deepest gratitude to Paul Gregory, Charles R. Larson, and Daniel Singer for their loving support.

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11 Contributors Sophia Barnes teaches in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has previously published in Doris Lessing Studies and is currently working on a manuscript titled We Must Go On Writing: Lessing, Bakhtin and the Politics of Authorship. Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Among her books are Darwin s Plots (1983, 3rd ed. 2009), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996). Her collected and annotated edition of Lewis Carroll s poems, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense, was published by Penguin in She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in Julie Cairnie is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her research interests include African childhood memoirs, postcolonial sport, and whiteness studies. She has published and presented widely in these areas. Her most recent book is Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the Twenty-First Century (2012), a multimedia collection that she co-edited with Dobrota Pucherova. Cornelius Collins teaches in the English Department at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and is at work on a manuscript titled The Fiction of Apocalypse: Globalization Narratives of Decline and Collapse after the Cold War. As of 2015, he is President of the Doris Lessing Society. Florence Howe taught English composition and literature for thirty years, eleven of them at Goucher College. She and others founded The Feminist Press in In 1971, she and the Press moved to the SUNY College at Old Westbury; in 1985, she and the Press moved to The City University of New York. She retired as professor and as publisher in 2000, returned in 2005, and retired again in She regards her most important publishing work as the Women Writing in India and the Women Writing Africa volumes.

12 xii Notes on Contributors Her recent publications include a memoir, A Life in Motion (2011), and a long essay, Lost and Found and What Happened Next, published in Contemporary Women s Writing in She is working on a new memoir called What I Left Out. She maintains a web site: Tonya Krouse is Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary British literature, gender and sexuality in literature, and critical theory. Her book, The Opposite of Desire: Sex and Pleasure in the Modernist Novel (2009), examines the depiction of sex and sexuality in D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Her critical essays have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Doris Lessing Studies, as well as in edited collections. Krouse served as President of the Doris Lessing Society from 2009 to Mark Pedretti is the Director of the Writing Center at Claremont Graduate University. He is currently working on a book about early British nuclear culture and literature. Jonah Raskin, Professor Emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author of fourteen books, including The Mythology of Imperialism: A Revolutionary Critique of Modern British Literature; For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman; American Scream: Allen Ginsberg s Howl and the Birth of the Beat Generation; Fields Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California; and, most recently, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature. He is also the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. A performance poet, he has published seven chapbooks including More Poems, Better Poems, Auras, and Snapshots of Ireland. Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film at Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. She is the author of Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (2012) and co-editor of Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009). She was President of the Doris Lessing Society ( ). Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Her book, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979), was one of the first scholarly studies of Lessing. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on Lessing as well as four other studies of fiction by modern and contemporary women writers: Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987), Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women s Fiction (2001),

13 Notes on Contributors xiii Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009), and, most recently, Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (2014). Paul Schlueter (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is the author, editor, or co-editor of a dozen books, including the first university press study of Lessing s fiction, The Novels of Doris Lessing (1973); the pioneering collection of essays by and about Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews (1974); a study of Shirley Ann Grau (1981); and An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers (1988, 1999). In addition, he has published numerous essays, reference book entries, and reviews. Sandra Singer is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Since her doctoral work at the University of Cambridge, she has been active in Lessing scholarship, in particular, coediting Doris Lessing Studies and Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (2010). She is working on an essay collection, J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works, and a book on the 9 11 novel s intersections with narratives of terror, trauma, and terrorism.