Heidi Bostic                                                       
Professional Statement

My research examines women’s subjectivity during the French Enlightenment and in its wake, across three related strands: feminist theory, narrative semiotics, and eighteenth-century French literature. I understand subjectivity as the way in which we become constituted as human subjects in relation to others, within and beyond language and institutions. My work contributes to critical discussions that question the universal masculine subject, reexamine the definition of Enlightenment thought, and acknowledge women as philosophers. In feminist theory, my primary interest is the thought of French philosopher Luce Irigaray; my publications include a book translation as well as articles in Cultural Studies, Reader, and Paragraph. In narrative semiotics, I bring aspects of the theory to bear on feminist approaches to textual analysis. My publications in this area include articles in Semiotics 2000 and Semiotics 2001 as well as the English-language translation of Jacques Fontanille's book Sémiotique du discours. In eighteenth-century literature, I focus on women’s claim to reason, a central feature of subjectivity in western thought; my publications include articles in SVEC, Women in French Studies, and Dalhousie French Studies. My book on women and reason in the French eighteenth century is under contract to be published with the University of Delaware Press.

Working at the intersection of these three areas, I demonstrate how our understanding of women’s subjectivity may be enriched by taking a long view across centuries and by forging dialogue among disciplines. In addition to the more familiar claim that recent feminist theory can elucidate early modern texts, I contend that eighteenth-century women’s works can inform contemporary debates in feminist theory. My scholarly activity has involved disciplinary border crossings, talking with philosophers about literature, with semioticians about feminism, and with eighteenth-century scholars about women’s forgotten contributions. Thus my work contributes to the growing interdisciplinary efforts identified as crucial to the humanities in the twenty-first century.

The interdisciplinary approach I have developed in these three areas reflects and enhances the unique institutional context in which I work. I am a member of a Department of Humanities encompassing a diverse variety of academic disciplines. I teach French language, literature, and culture courses at all undergraduate levels and introductory Spanish language courses as well as graduate seminars in Gender Studies and narrative theory in my department’s M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. Many of the courses I teach are directly informed by my research, as for example the French seminar on The Individual and Society for which I earned the ASECS Teaching Competition Award in 2001–02.

As a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad de Talca, Chile, in 2004, I pursued a project entitled “Women, Narrative, and Identity: Crafting the Self across Cultures,” researching how gender intersects with the issues of modernity and identity. As part of this project, I taught two courses in Spanish: “Women’s Identity through Literature” and “U.S. Culture and Society.” The Fulbright experience enables me to contribute further to the comparative and cross-cultural aspects of teaching and research in my department. It also provides a more global context for future directions in my work.

Subjectivity in the Thought of Luce Irigaray

My early research focuses on the thought of Luce Irigaray, with whom I studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In “Thinking Life as Relation: An Interview with Luce Irigaray” (Man and World 1996; rpt 2000), Stephen Pluhacek and I pose questions focusing on Irigaray’s critique of the masculine universal subject and her concept of relational identity. More recently, in “Reading and Rethinking the Subject in Luce Irigaray’s Recent Work” (Paragraph 2002), from the point of view of one who reads, teaches, and translates Irigaray’s work, I outline the ways in which her theory helps us learn how to approach the other as other, establish new practices, and strengthen community. Responding to the charge of heterosexism leveled against Irigaray by scholars in cultural studies, I argue in “Luce Irigaray and Love” (Cultural Studies 2002) that her focus on male/female relationships is a strategic choice motivated by social realities and philosophical aims. I explore the power of Irigaray’s proposal of love as a model not just for intimate relationships but for civic interactions as well. The article shows that Irigaray’s thought on the negative, on silence, and on listening contributes to a theory of relational identity that can lead to the building of a new social order, a point I also highlight in my article on Irigaray in The Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought (2004). I was one of 14 scholars invited to give a talk on Irigaray’s work at an international conference in England in 2001; I also gave an invited lecture on her work at the Universidad de Chile in 2004. My research on Irigaray has been supported by Michigan Tech through a competitive Faculty Scholarship Grant. In all of this work, I situate Irigaray as a thinker in the Enlightenment lineage broadly construed, engaged with the vital issues of the subject and the citizen.

 
My scholarship on Irigaray includes a number of translations. I view translation as a uniquely challenging way to deepen my understanding of a text and of the workings of language in general; it also provides a vital service to fellow scholars. My major contribution in this area is The Way of Love (Continuum, 2002), a translation I prepared with Stephen Pluhacek of Irigaray’s book La Voie de l’amour. In this book, Irigaray dialogues with the later work of Martin Heidegger in order to continue her thinking about possibilities for fruitful coexistence between women and men. This translation, based upon an unpublished French manuscript and undertaken at the request of Luce Irigaray and in close collaboration with her, is the book’s first publication in any language. Creating this translation offered a rich opportunity for thinking about reading, about being-in-relation, and about language, leading me to write “Reading in Translation: Luce Irigaray’s The Way of Love” (Reader 2003), in which I explore ways to read, interpret, and translate Irigaray’s work in terms of her thinking about language, love, and the relation between two. To illustrate these points, I draw upon specific difficulties involved in translating this book, for example, how to render in the English translation Irigaray’s references to French-language translations of Heidegger’s German texts. My other translations of Irigaray’s work include “On Old and New Tablets,” which appeared as the introduction to the edited collection Religion in French Feminist Thought (2003), as well as the collaborative translations “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two” (Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger 2001) and “Being Two, How Many Eyes Have We?” (Paragraph 2002).

Subjectivity, Narrative Semiotics, and Feminist Literary Analysis

Since studying at the EHESS I have continued to elucidate the usefulness of narrative semiotic theory for analyzing subjectivity, particularly in the context of feminist approaches to literature. In “Formalism Meets Feminism: The Semiotics of Passions as a Tool for Literary Analysis” (Semiotics 2000), I critique the early phase of narrative semiotics for its understanding of the subject merely as the sum of its actions and suggest how more recent developments in the theory can enhance analysis attuned to gender and social context. I illustrate this idea through interpretation of a novel by Isabelle de Charrière. In “Gender and the Subject of Narrative Semiotics” (Semiotics 2001), I build upon this work, emphasizing the importance of the body both in the semiotics of the passions and in feminist analysis, and drawing upon Irigaray’s work on subjectivity as well as other philosophers’ theories of the narrative construction of identity. I test this interdisciplinary method by offering a brief analysis of a novel by Marie Jeanne Riccoboni.

I have completed an English translation of Jacques Fontanille’s Sémiotique du discours, his ambitious overview of the field of narrative semiotics, as The Semiotics of Discourse, which was published in 2006 as part of the Peter Lang series Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics. This translation project was supported by Michigan Tech through two competitive Faculty Scholarship Grants. My other work in narrative semiotics includes articles on Ferdinand de Saussure and A.J. Greimas published in The Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought (2004).

Women and Reason in the French Enlightenment

My most recent scholarship argues that the eighteenth-century French women authors Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière responded to widespread attacks on women’s reason by affirming women’s ability to reason and their right to exercise that reason in both the private and public spheres. In “The Light of Reason in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne” (Dalhousie French Studies 2003) I argue that Françoise de Graffigny uses the metaphor of the sun to illustrate a woman’s claim to reason and pursuit of Enlightenment. Challenging other interpretations, I propose that the focus of Graffigny’s novel is not love but learning, not sentiment but reason. In “‘Que faire pour être raisonnable ?’: La Réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit de Françoise de Graffigny” (SVEC 2004) I further develop my study of the women and reason theme in Graffigny’s work by analyzing a little-known unpublished early comic play, which Graffigny likely co-authored with her friend François-Antoine Devaux. To my knowledge, this is the first published article on the play. I show that the work takes up a popular topic—the perceived separation between good sense and wit in society—and makes it an occasion for critiquing the subordination of women and for affirming women’s ability and right to reason. The play, like Graffigny’s novel, exposes society’s quite different definitions of raisonnable for women and for men.

 
I extended this line of inquiry to Charrière’s work in my 2006 article “From Convention to Performance: The Woman of Reason in Letters of Mistress Henley Published by her Friend,” in which, against critics who view Charrière’s protagonist as an unreasonable victim of her sentimentality, I interpret Samuel de Constant’s novel Le Mari sentimental as an attack on women who reason and Charrière’s Lettres de Mistriss Henley as a response to this attack. This essay grew out of a lecture I gave at an international conference on Charrière’s work in the Netherlands in 2005, where I was one of 22 invited speakers. I examine the topic of women and reason in the broader context of Enlightenment in my article “Sexual Education as Enlightenment in Riccoboni’s Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd à Mylord Charles Alfred and Histoire du Marquis de Cressy” (Women in French Studies 2004). There, I argue that Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s first two novels illustrate the two possible outcomes of sexual education, defined as learning about the sexual politics of living in a world of male power, for eighteenth-century women: Enlightenment (making their way in the public sphere of ideas) or death.

The culmination of this work is a recently-completed single-authored book manuscript, “The Enlightenment is a Fiction: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century,” under contract to be published by the University of Delaware Press. The book studies the contributions of Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière to debates on women and reason and links these contributions to twenty-first-century concerns, including women’s rights, access to knowledge, and roles in public life. In this project, I maintain that the eighteenth-century writers I analyze deserve recognition as philosophers, just as I would argue that the contemporary feminist theory I engage may usefully be understood as following from the Enlightenment heritage. Spanning disciplines and centuries, my work seeks to redefine the terms of debate in discussions about women’s subjectivity.