Who Is It For? Personal Writing and Antagonistic Readers

<p>Feminist accounts of how “the personal” is used in feminist critical nonfiction have theorized that the effect of the personal is to connect the writer with readers who share a sense of her investment in the subject matter. Looking at two recent, prominent works about gender and sexuality, and race, respectively that combine genres of criticism and narrative memoir – Maggie Nelson’s <em>The Argonauts</em> and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s <em>Between the World and Me</em> – this paper considers how personal writing is shaped not by readers it wants to connect to, but by anxious, even dreadful, anticipation of being read by its most resistant and vitriolic readers. I argue that Nelson’s and Coates’s formally dexterous choices – particularly their respective decisions to address their narratives to second person intimates – have been shaped in response to their understandings of what I call the antagonistic reader, a reader whose cognitive and emotional resistance to the writer’s words poses a threat to the text.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Master

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Women's and Gender Studies

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2018

Author dc:creator

• Glaser, Dana

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nancy K. Miller

• English Language and Literature
• Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Maggie Nelson
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• critical memoir
• personal
• feminist
• second-person

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2594

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-3759