In this article I analyze some theoretical and historical aspects of the relationship between authorship and gender in 17th century France. I am especially interested in the gender-specific access to authorship and writing as well as in the construction of female and male author identities. In the first instance I discuss different theoretical approaches to authorship which - with reference to poststructuralism - all have in common the dismissal and deconstruction of the myth of the creative original genius. Instead they declare the author to be the symptom of specific discourse constellations, a semantic field of forces or the point of intersection of different discourses. Thus the figure of the author becomes important again, but this time in order to analyze specific cultural processes. As these approaches are mostly gender-blind and only oriented by male historical authors without taking their gender into account, they universalize a male, bourgeois author subject. Thus, they do not see specific forms of female authorship in the 17th century such as the collective salon writing or the hybrid work form of the “female” genre “letter.”
Umkämpfte Zugänge zur Schrift. Theoretische und historische Aspekte geschlechtsspezifischer Autoridentitäten im französischen 17. Jahrhundert
JVF Conference Papers
