When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," originally published in College English in the fall of 1972,[1] is an essay by American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). It discusses several concepts needed by women writers to enable them to overcome the conditioning of a patriarchal sense of literary aesthetics and history. The essay, originally a lecture delivered by Rich at a women’s writer convention, emphasizes the need for re-visioning of old texts, renaming of the various aspects of women which have been distorted by a male point of view, and developing a new form of writing that is free of the haunting male gaze, of convention and propriety and of the ‘male’ language and its implications.
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Rich says that the act of re-visioning would help women to analyze and to act on “how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh.”[2]