Doane, Janice (L.) 1950-

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DOANE, Janice (L.) 1950-

PERSONAL: Born August 10, 1950, in Louisville, KY; daughter of Ivan G. (a personnel director) and Mary Martha (a teacher; maiden name, Rice) Doane; married James Anthony Mott (a systems engineer), August 18, 1979; children: Sara Doane, Alex Doane. Education: State University of New York at Buffalo, B.A. (cum laude), 1972, Ph.D., 1981; University of Wisconsin, Madison, M.A., 1974.

ADDRESSES: Home—8160 Phaeton Dr., Oakland, CA 94605. Office—Department of English, St. Mary's College of California, Dante 306, P.O. Box 4730, Moraga, CA 94575. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: State University of New York College at Buffalo, instructor in English, 1980-83; St. Mary's College of California, Moraga, assistant professor, 1984-89, associate professor of English, 1989—, department head, 1993—. Instructor at Canisius College, 1980-82, and Medaille College, 1981.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of Pembroke Center for Women, Brown University, 1983-84.

WRITINGS:

Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1986.

(With Devon Hodges) Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism, Methuen (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Devon Hodges) From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1992.

(With Devon Hodges) Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited by Judith Spector, Bowling Green State University Press, 1986; and Modernity and Mass Culture, edited by James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University Press, 1991. Contributor to journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Janice Doane's writings reflect her interest in feminist theory, and Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire, is her third book with coauthor Devon Hodges. The authors write that they "hope to offer strategies for thinking about the multiple ways in which women have told incest stories and gained a hearing."

Doane and Hodges study incest narratives from the late nineteenth century to the present time, with particular emphasis on the last three decades of the twentieth century, "when," wrote Sharon O'Brien in the Women's Review of Books, "Feminism and backlash prompted the emergence of three kinds of incest narratives: first, 'breaking silence' narratives, later, stories repudiating false memory syndrome, and most recently, counternarratives that acknowledge the fragmentary nature of memory yet insist on the reality of incest."

The book opens with a discussion of Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul and a comparison to case records collected and studied by Linda Gordon in Heroes of Their Own Lives, Sojourner Truth's Narrative, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Other writings that are considered include Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Louise Armstrong's Kiss Daddy Goodnight, and Judith Herman's Father-Daughter Incest. Several books are considered for their demonstration of recovery, both of memory and from abuse. They include Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Jane Smiley's novel, A Thousand Acres, and The Courage to Heal, a recovery workbook by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Telling Incest concludes with close readings of Sapphire's Push and Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, which set abuse against backgrounds of extreme urban and rural poverty.

Choice reviewer D. Seelow called Telling Incest "a balanced perspective on the representation of incest in a variety of contemporary texts."

Doane told CA: "After briefly considering a career in journalism, I elected instead to pursue my love and fascination for literature. I was particularly interested in the State University of New York at Buffalo for its fine offerings in literary theory, especially the program in psychology and literature, the only such program at the time. I pursued a minor in psychology and literature, while focusing on contemporary critical theory and modernist literature.

"As I began my dissertation on Gertrude Stein, I became convinced that Stein's position as a woman writer had profoundly influenced her stylistic departures from nineteenth-century literature. This intellectual discovery drew me into a more active communal effort with other women in the English literature graduate program. With them I initiated courses on feminist critical theory, and I began writing with a fellow graduate student, Devon Hodges, who has since become my coauthor on a number of projects.

"Although I often claim that it is 'theoretically' appropriate for feminists to write together, more simply it is also a joy to work with someone with whom I feel theoretically and temperamentally aligned. Our partnership has enabled us to remain productive through job searches, heavy teaching loads, and family demands.

"In 1983 I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pembroke Center for Women at Brown University. This fellowship not only put me in contact with many exciting feminist scholars, but also enabled me to accomplish an enormous amount of research and writing for my second book, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference.

"The primary focus of my career has been feminist critical theory, but my interest has carried me beyond my academic specialty in American literature into research and writing on psychoanalysis, sociology, history, the media, and popular culture."