Tania Modleski

Tania Modleski (born 1949) is an American feminist scholar and cultural critic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, "to begin a feminist analysis of women's reading", considered three popular fictional genres: the Harlequin romance, the Gothic novel and the daytime US soap opera.[1] Modleski argued that the formulaic nature of these genres gave readers the freedom to construct their own response, at a distance from the text. Her next book, The Women Who Knew Too Much, examined seven Hitchcock films: Blackmail, Murder, Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo and Frenzy. Modelski now challenged the terms of taking 'distance' from a text, arguing that "the desire for distance itself [is] ... bound up with the male's insistence on his difference from woman." By contrast to male violence, the 'feminine' could embrace "narrative empathy, spectatorial passivity, and the subconscious imaginary".[2]

In Feminism Without Women, Modleski argued that "male power frequently works to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity", and that the writer has a responsibility to re-articulate women's shared experience.[2]

Works
  • Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. London: Methuen, 1982
  • The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and feminist theory. New York: Methuen, 1983
  • (ed.) Studies in entertainment: critical approaches to mass culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
  • Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.
  • Old wives' tales, and other women's stories. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

References
  1. Clancy, Kim (2003). "Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women". In Barker, Martin; Beezer, Anne (eds.). Reading Into Cultural Studies. Routledge. pp. 122–136. ISBN 978-1-134-92285-7.
  2. Draper, Ellen (2009). "Modleski, Tania". In Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. Routledge. pp. 377–8. ISBN 978-1-135-22129-4.
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