Writings
Gallop's most controversial book addresses the issue of sexual harassment. In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment she documents her experiences being accused of sexual harassment at her workplace, and formulates a feminist response to the emotional episode.
Gallop also writes about her personal and professional experiences in Anecdotal Theory. She uses personal narrative as a starting point for critical essays in the hopes of producing a "more literary theory."
Living with His Camera (Duke University Press, 2003) focuses on the relationship between photography as art and photography as family history. Gallop explores how the photography of her longtime partner, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee film professor Dick Blau, chronicles their relationship and also relationships between them and their two children, Max and Ruby. On the basis of black and white photographs of them that Blau regularly took, Gallop became interested in the implications of being the photograph's subject. Blau's talent for finding the perfect picture in the mundane moment is combined with Gallop's commentary as a subject and as a scholar. Each chapter involves analysis of an influential book concerning photography—including Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography in relation to Blau's photographs. Gallop's analysis of what she finds in the photographs focuses on male/female relationships, childhood, sibling rivalry, intimate and erotic moments, and how the camera both captures and distorts these moments. Her conclusion is that the camera has become a "third person" in her relationship with Blau, creating the triangle of photographer, camera, and subject. Then too, the camera is able to show new angles, insights, flaws, and wonders that the individual people cannot themselves see without the camera's special quality for freezing and framing moments and experiences in time.
Her critical interest in time is further explored in her most recent book, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (Duke University Press, 2011) In this book Gallop revisits a familiar concept in literary criticism, the so-called "death of the author", and considers not only the abstract theoretical death of the author but also the writer's literal death. Through close readings of the literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality for both the reader and writer. She adds new connotations to the phrase and concept by connecting an author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths.
Read more about this topic: Jane Gallop
Famous quotes containing the word writings:
“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.”
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“If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be “To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.””
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)