The in between of writing: Experience and experiment in the work of Margaret Drabble, Marguerite Duras, and Hannah Arendt

This dissertation explores the relation of women's experience and literary experiment in order to answer the question, "Why are so few women writing in the postmodern vein?" This question looms large because, in an effort to write themselves into literary history, to make a place from which they can write, to find a woman's voice and even a language, women have been writing more than ever and they have been involved with new approaches to writing and reading. Yet postmodernism (a rubric for much of the experimental prose fiction done since World War II, for much of what is new in writing) and feminism have failed to connect. It is this failure that is the locus of this exploration as it takes place in the work of three disparate women writers, Margaret Drabble, an English novelist, Marguerite Duras, a French novelist and filmaker, and Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist. What ties these writers together in this study is that each has a distinct relation to language and a close tie to world history that remains largely untreated by literary feminists.;In the first chapter, the issues as indicated above are laid out along with a brief history of the development of feminist literary theory. In addition, introductions to the three writers are given in which the "scene of writing" of each one is brought to the foreground along with her special interests in and use of language. Chapters two, three and four consists of close readings of several works of each writer that are informed by several of the newer approaches to literature: psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguisitics, and deconstruction. Each of the readings discovers the scene of writing of each writer through the language of the text and shows how each has used language usually in ways not read or remarked before. In this manner the relation of women's experience and literary experiment is articulated.;The Afterword explains that there is no one definitive answer to the opening question, "Why are so few women writing in the postmodern vein?" and that the question constitutes the "scene of writing" of this dissertation which records the struggle for the answer.