Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
104. "to the extent that the author...stands as a kind of shorthand for a whole series of beliefs about the function of the work of art as (paternally authorized) monument in our culture, feminist criticism...should have found a supporting (if not supportive) argument in the language of its claims. it is, after all, the author...who excludes the less-known works of women and minority writers from the canon, and who by his authority justifies the exclusion. by the same token, feminist criticism's insistence upon the importance of the reader...should have found affinities with a position that understands the birth of the reader as the necessary counterpoint to the death of the author"--but "the removal of the author has not so much made room for a revision of the concept of authorship as it has...repressed and inhibited discussion of any writing identity in favor of the (new) monolith of anonymous textuality, or 'transcendental anonymity'" (as misha calls it)--"it matterns not who writes"
105. what barthes does offer is an "interest in the semiotics of literary and cultural activity" that "intersects thematically with a feminist emphasis on the need to situate socially and symboliclly the practices of reading and writing. like the feminist critic, barthes explores and exploits the complex and tricky relations between the personal and the political; the personal and the criical; the interpersonal and the institutional"
107. "feminist critics in the united states have on the whole resisted the fable of the author's demise on the grounds that stories of textuality which trade in universals--the author or the reader--in fact articulate marked and differentiated structures of what gayatri spivak has called masculine 'regulative psychobiography.' they have looked at the material of the female authorial project as the location of perhaps a different staging of the drama of the writing subject."
109. & adrienne, adrienne... "the girl or woman who tries to write...comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of woman in books written by women. she finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds la belle dame sans merci, she finds juliet or tess or salomé, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, druging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."
114. "my hope for the fraternal (as opposed to sororal) model is that its oddness in feminist discourse saves it--if only rhetorically...from the automatic solidarities of sisterhood that have recently come under attack in so many quarters as being repressive of the differences between and among women"
116. "if women's studies is to effect institutional change, we cannot afford to proceed by the unequivocal rejection of 'male' models. rather...the possiblitiy of future feminist intervention requires an ironic manipulation of the semiotics of performance and production"; "i want to float the suggestion...that any definition of the female writing subject...that we may try to theorize today must include...ambiguities. that is a process that...acknowledges our ongoing contradictions, the gap, and the (perhaps permanent) internal split that makes a collective identity or integrity only a horizon"