Wolf, Christa--Criticism and interpretation

Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
In their essays and fiction, both Virginia Woolf and Christa
Wolf address epistemological limitations inherent in
patriarchy. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf investigates the
gendered roles of author and character in Western literature
and literary tradition. In Voraussetzungen einer
Erzaehlung: Kassandra, Wolf analyzes the history and
repercussions of Western patriarchal social structures in
aesthetics and politics. Woolf's Between the Acts and
Wolf's Nachdenken ueber Christa T. and Kassandra enact
literary transitions past a prescriptive epistemology, which
categorizes all experience according to gendered
preconceptions of reality, to a unified view of aesthetic
experience. Moreover, critical response to their writing
reflects an historically grounded shift in interpretation.
Woolf's contemporaries were interested in stylistic and
technical innovations. Critics writing after 1970 have
focused chiefly on the epistemological implications in the
works of both authors.
Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
Cassandra of Troy acts as a symbol of the repressed women in Western society, yet she has also become the figure that reawakens the female literary voice in modern times. Christa Wolf's Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays is the prime example of this literary movement: the female point of view emerges from a patriarchal myth that originally silenced her. Other examples of the re-emerging voice are Christa Wolf's retelling of Medea, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Kassandra in The Firebrand, and Octavia Butler's prophetic Lauren Oya Olamina (a reflection of an African female goddess's power) in the Parable of the Sower series.