Rose, Jacqueline (S.) 1949-

views updated

ROSE, Jacqueline (S.) 1949-

PERSONAL:

Born 1949, in Hayes, Middlesex, England; children: one daughter. Education: St. Hilda's, Oxford, degree (English); Sorbonne, University of Paris, M.A. (literature); University College, London, Ph.D. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Hampstead, England. Office—English and Drama Department, Queen Mary College, University of London, Mile End Rd., London E1 4NS, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and author. University of Sussex, Sussex, England, lecturer in English, 1976-92; Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, professor of English, 1992—. Oxford University Clarendon Lecturer, 1994. Presenter of television documentary A Dangerous Liaison: Israel and America, 2002.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fawcett Prize for nonfiction (joint winner), 1991, for The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and translator, with Juliet Mitchell) Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1982.

The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1984.

Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso (London, England), 1986.

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein, B. Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

States of Fantasy (Clarendon lectures), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Albertine, Chatto and Windus (London, England), 2001.

A Dangerous Liaison: Israel and America (documentary), Channel 4, 2002.

On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2003.

(Author of response) Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, introduction by Christopher Bollas, Verso (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including the London Observer.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jacqueline Rose is an educator, journalist, and literary critic who resides in London, England. Well known for her feminist reading of literature, she is both respected and controversial. In her 1996 work, States of Fantasy, a collection of her Clarendon lectures, "the reader is bracingly confronted with a genuinely innovative and adventurous style of investigating literary acts," noted Times Literary Supplement contributor Edward Said. Rose's books, wrote Alex Clark in the Guardian, "reflect an interest, in her own words, in 'the interface between literature, psychoanalysis, politics and culture.'" Along with teaching and writing, Rose is keenly interested in the Israeli and Palestinian crisis in the Middle East, and in 2002 wrote and presented the television documentary A Dangerous Liaison: Israel and America for British station Channel 4. Noting Rose's talent as a stylist as well as her overall knowledge, Said wrote of her work: "it is her critical intelligence that impresses one the most, not just because it is rare to have a critic accomplish so many fine acts of reading, but also because there is so satisfying a coincidence between her literary attainments and her political consciousness as an intellectual woman with openly declared existential and human affiliations."

Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction discusses the reasons why modernist and postmodernist literary movements have not had a great influence on children's literature. Much of Rose's study is based on an examination of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which made its stage debut in 1904 and was published as a novel in 1911 under the title Peter and Wendy. Rose describes how the original story was altered, abridged, or retold when various groups of adults intended to present it to groups of children. In the Times Educational Supplement, Neil Philip wrote, "Rose makes us think seriously about many issues conventional criticism has ignored or side-stepped, both in Peter Pan and the wider context of children's literature." Barbara Taylor, writing in New Statesman, called The Case of Peter Pan "a complex, absorbing book … with much to say to would-be grown-ups about the 'ongoing sexual and political mystification of the child' imposed … on all of us."

In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Rose examines the short life and work of poet Sylvia Plath, as well as the criticism and commentary on Plath's work that has developed since her suicide. Rose also discusses the influence of Plath's husband, noted poet Ted Hughes, on his wife's life and work. While admitting to a bias against Rose's critical slant, in her article for the New Yorker, Janet Malcolm praised Rose's work as "a brilliant achievement. The framework of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and feminist ideology on which Rose has mounted her polemic … gives the work a high intellectual shimmer.… Oneis dazzled, excited, somewhat intimidated." Malcolm explained that Hughes fought publication of the book, and observed that, in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath Rose "speaks for the dead poet and against Hughes in a way no other writer has done."

Journal of English and Germanic Philology critic Margaret Dickie wrote that in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Rose's subject is "set finally in the context of her own anxieties and life story." In American Literature, Stacy Carson Hubbard found that the book provides a new view of Plath, noting that "Rose's book—original, deftly argued, and bold both in its perceptions and in the materials it chooses to include—will render most existing criticism of Plath obsolete."

Rose collects her essays in several volumes, among them States of Fantasy, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, and Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein. Charles Leadbeater in New Statesman observed that in States of Fantasy "Rose, with verve, imagination and ingenuity, argues that fantasy is central to modern politics: it is the psychic glue that holds together our social reality." Leadbeater also noted that "Rose writes with engaging directness." "Why War?," wrote Anthony Elliott in the Times Higher Education Supplement, "sets out some of the fundamental issues in contemporary psychoanalytic feminism. In eloquent critiques, Rose explicates the complex, contradictory relations between gender and fantasy, feminism and psychoanalysis."

Albertine, Rose's first novel, follows Albertine Simonet, an orphaned young woman raised by an aunt who ultimately dies in a riding accident, and Albertine's affair with a young man named Marcel. Rose draws both her protagonists from French novelist Marcel Proust's classic novel Á la recherche du temps perdu. In Albertine the author's "primary purpose is to return to Albertine her intelligence; to give her a voice that, if confused, is nonetheless as richly suggestive and provocative as her creator's," explained Clark in his Guardian review. In an interview with Natia Valman for Jewish Quarterly, Rose elaborated on her reasons for revisiting Proust: "Proust's narrative could be summed up as 'man falls in love with woman, man traps woman, woman escapes, woman dies.' It's … a story that's been central to feminism: what men do to women, how they control and subjugate them.… But I don't think … women living with men are powerless, however forceful and oppressive and brutish men can be—I think it's always more complex. I've also always thought that it's never been in the interest of feminism to represent women as without agency." "The main difficulty with Albertine," observed Adrian Tahourdin in the Times Literary Supplement, "is Proust's novel itself. Many readers will find it impossible to avoid making unfair comparisons with A la recherche du temps perdu." However, in his review for the Independent, Richard Canning maintained that readers of Albertine need have no familiarity with Proust's lengthy and difficult work. Calling Rose's novel "an absorbing read, taut and lyrical," Canning added that "It's also very much complete in its own fictional world"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Literature, December, 1994, Stacy Carson Hubbard, review of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, pp. 862-863.

Essays in Criticism, April, 1998, Julia Griffin, review of States of Fantasy, p. 192.

Guardian, October 27, 2001, Alex Clark, review of Albertine, p. 10.

Independent (London, England), October 27, 2001, Richard Canning, "The Woman in Marcel's Mirror," p. 10.

Jewish Quarterly, spring, 2002, Nadia Valman, "Proust's Phantom" (interview), pp. 9-12.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, October, 1993, Margaret Dickie, review of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, p. 594.

Minnesota Review, spring, 1990, Adrienne Auslander Munich, review of Sexuality in the Field of Vision, pp. 143-145.

New Statesman, July 6, 1984, Barbara Taylor, review of The Case of Peter Pan, Or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, p. 26; August 2, 1996, Charles Leadbeater, review of States of Fantasy, p. 48.

New Yorker, August 23, 1993, Janet Malcolm, "The Silent Woman—II," pp. 134-159.

Times Educational Supplement, July 20, 1984, Neil Philip, "Taming Childhood," p. 16.

Times Higher Education Supplement, January 28, 1994, Anthony Elliott, review of Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein, p. 20; March 28, 2003, Gary Day, review of On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, p. 28.

Times Literary Supplement, August 9, 1996, Edward Said, "Fantasy's Role in the Making of Nations," pp. 7-8; November 2, 2001, Adrian Tahourdin, "A Girlish Life," p. 23; May 2, 2003, Brenda Maddox, review of On Not Being Able to Sleep, p. 12.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1992, Ellin Sarot, "One Death, Many Lives," p. 21.