Abstract
This chapter grew out of a series of reflections on my uprooting from a Department of English and transplantation to a Centre for Women’s Studies. For practical and institutional reasons, I have not, unlike many academics working on women’s-studies courses, retained a foothold in a ‘parent’ department, but have moved, lock, stock and typewriter, to my new home. This experience has been both exhilarating and disconcerting, and provides the starting point for these musings in the form of an arpeggio of questions: What am I? … doing? … here?
But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk.
(Woolf, 1984 [1929], p. 27)
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Broughton, T. (1993). Cross Purposes: Literature, (In)discipline and Women’s Studies. In: de Groot, J., Maynard, M. (eds) Women’s Studies in the 1990s. Women’s Studies at York Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22928-4_4
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