Rhetorical Strategies of Cooperation and Resistance in Lou Andreas-Salome’s Woman

Main Article Content

Erika Kegyes

Abstract

The judgment of Lou Andreas-Salomé in her own time and even today is ambivalent. The theorists of the women's movement of the time did not accept her into their ranks, and she had debates with them about the concept of Woman. Some scholars today consider her a forerunner of modern feminism, while others see her as an anti-feminist. Salomé's ambivalent reception is partly due to the fact that she had to forge a new language. She integrated images of psychoanalysis with a subversive, above all, ironic rhetoric. The aim of this study is to analyze Salomé's linguistic images and explore the contradictions that characterize her writings. I shall argue that Salomé did not produce a unified theory about the relationship between men and women but made an attempt to articulate the female images she conceived in her literary figures. The judgment of Lou Andreas-Salomé is controversial, not least for the specificities of the literary register.

Article Details

How to Cite
Kegyes, Erika. 2022. “Rhetorical Strategies of Cooperation and Resistance in Lou Andreas-Salome’s Woman”. Interdisciplinary EJournal of Gender Studies 12 (1):60-84. https://doi.org/10.14232/tntef.2022.1.60-84.
Section
Articles
Author Biography

Erika Kegyes, University of Szeged

KEGYES, ERIKA associate professor at the Department of Hungarian and Applied Linguistics, Gyula Juhász Faculty of Teacher Training, University of Szeged. In 2022, she defended her habilitation thesis at the University of Innsbruck, a comparative rhetorical study of women’s images in 19th century genres. Her field of research is concerned with rhetorical and discursive construction of images of women, studying the writing techniques of women in the early women’s movement. She is currently a researcher at the University of Innsbruck in the GRADA project, which aims to examine the construction of images of Jewish women.