Ethics

This dissertation investigates the ethics of authorial collaboration in contemporary collaborative women’s writing and its effect on the power dynamics inherent in the writing process. Collaborative writing occupies a continuum, from ethnographic autobiography, in which the writer outranks the generally anonymous subject, to the celebrity “ghostwritten” autobiography, which overturns this hierarchy. This study focuses more narrowly on more covert forms of collaboration implying a differential of symbolic capital that foregrounds asymmetrical writing relationships. Importantly, these asymmetrical relationships cannot be unproblematically reduced to the general (or generic) conception of “coauthorship,” turning instead towards a form of paratextual dialogue that acknowledges the presence of diverse and sometimes conflicting authorial voices that manifest themselves in various ways in different parts of the text.
By focusing on a variety of covert collaborative forms, including so-told narratives from different epochs and traditions, the dissertation will expand our conception of collaborative writing and simultaneously develop a more dialogic notion of authorship, putting in conversation Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony with feminist theory. The case studies present in the dissertation, ranging from feminist journals of the 1970s to slave narratives, provide the crucial function of offering a profound and carefully nuanced series of contexts in which to examine the deeper moral principles and obligations that tie collaborators to each other. Simultaneously, this analysis aims to start a discussion about privilege in the writing collaborative process as well as issues of minority representation in literature.
The relationship between authorial voices that hold a differential of symbolic capital also invites to reflect on the complicated sociocultural dynamics between socalled “dominant” or “prestige” languages–what Pascale Casanova calls “dominating” languages–and “minority” languages (such as Italian dialects and Guadeloupean Creole). For this reason, starting from the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia this dissertation leads to a sociolinguistic analysis of the linguistic habits of collaborators, highlighting how language becomes one of the forms of power imbalance.

Henry James's and Plato's presumed ideological incompatibility is fostered in part by the philosopher's well documented censure of literature and the arts and by his belief that true knowledge is secured by purely rational apprehension. Henry James, however, contends that the philosopher and novelist have comparable concerns, for both seek truth and the origins and meaning of virtue. Plato's conception of knowledge and ethics, however, differs markedly from James's: if true knowledge is commensurate with rational apprehension, emotions and imagination distort rather than elucidate truth. Yet is there but a single path to knowledge? In What Maisie Knew James illustrates that learning, like narrative, is an experiential process involving intuition, emotion, and imagination. Moreover, although Jamesian and Platonic thought may appear antithetical, a comprehensive study of their works reveals not only the expected differences, but certain unexpected discursive and ideological similarities.