Narratives from within: An arendtian approach to life histories and the writing of history

Journal of Educational Administration and History

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 115-131

  Tamboukou, Maria ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Arendt; Art education; Life histories; Visual narratives; Women artists

Indexed keywords

EID: 79957996649     PISSN: 00220620     EISSN: 14787431     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00220621003701288     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Joan W. Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', in Feminism and History, ed. J. Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167. This essay was first presented at the meetings of the American Historical Association in December 1985 and was subsequently published in American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986).
2. Ibid., 167-9.
3. Ibid., 174-5.
4. Ibid., 154.
5. Ibid., 169.
6. Joan W. Scott, 'The Evidence of Experience', Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773-97.
7. See Maria Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), particularly Chapter One, for an overview of the field of women's autobiographical narratives and a discussion of Scott's contribution in it.
8. Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self.
9. For an overview of Stevens' paintings, see http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/stevens_may.html
10. Julia Kristeva, Life is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 6.
11. Liliane Weissberg, 'Introduction: Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen and the Writing of (Auto)biography', in H. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. L. Weissberg (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 21.
12. Arendt, cited in Kristeva, Life is a Narrative, 9.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 19.
15. Ibid., 16.
16. May Stevens in conversation with Patricia Hills. Patricia Hills, May Stevens (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2005), 11.
17. Hills, May Stevens, 17.
18. Mara R. Witzling, 'May Stevens', in Voicing Today's Visions: Writings by Contemporary Women Artists, ed. M.R. Witzling (New York: Universe Publishing, 1997), 66.
19. Hills, May Stevens, 17.
20. Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001).
21. I have written extensively elsewhere about the history of MNAS and I worked in its archives in March and April 2006.
22. See Maria Tamboukou, 'Machinic Assemblages: Women, Art Education and Space', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29, no. 3 (2008): 359-375.
23. Massachusetts College of Arts, Archives, Visionary Education: 125 Years of Massachussetts College of Arts (Boston: Massachussets College of Arts, 1998), 3.
24. Diana Korzenik, 'The Art Education of Working Women, 1873-1903', in From Pilgrims and Pioneers: New England Women in the Arts, ed. A. Faxon and S. Moore (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1987), 33.
25. Mary Ann Stankiewicz, 'From the aesthetic movement to the arts and crafts movement', Studies in Art Education 33, no.3 (1992): 165-73.
26. Dalton, Gendering of Art Education, 4.
27. Tamboukou, 'Machinic Assemblages'.
28. Arendt, cited in Kristeva, Life is a Narrative, 17.
29. Jens Brockmeier, 'From the End to the Beginning', in Narrative and Identity Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. J. Brockmeier and D. Carbaugh (Toronto: University of Toronto and Freie Universität Berlin, University of Massachusetts at Amherst), 255.
30. Michail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981).
31. Brockmeier, 'End to the Beginning', 255.
32. From Ordinary/Extraordinary, The Artist's Book, 1980, cited in Witzling, 'May Stevens', 79.
33. For some images of the Ordinary/Extraordinary series
34. See http://www.mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?coll_keywords=May+Stevens&coll_has_images=1 and Hills, May Stevens.
35. Hills, May Stevens, 43.
36. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: A Harvest Book, 1985).
37. Hills, May Stevens, 43.
38. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. L. Weissberg (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
39. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2000).
40. Weissberg, 'Introduction', 19.
41. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198.
42. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 83.
43. Kristeva, Life is a Narrative, 13.
44. Arendt, cited in Weissberg, 'Introduction', 5.
45. It has to be noted here that Arendt first read Varnhagen's letters through the chopped and censored edition her husband circulated, shortly after her death in 1833 and which was then published as a three-volume memoir
46. See Weissberg, 'Introduction', 13.
47. Cited in Weissberg, 'Introduction', 11.
48. Ibid., 50.
49. See, Elżbieta Ettinger, ed., Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979).
50. For an overview of this literature and critical essays on Stevens' work
51. see the two exhibition catalogues: May Stevens, Ordinary/Extraordinary, A Summation 1977-1984 (Boston: Boston University Art Galleries, 1984) and Rosa, Alice: May Stevens, Ordinary/Extraordinary, ed. M. Dabakis and J. Bell (New York: Universe Books, 1988).
52. See also Hills, May Stevens.
53. Lisa Tickner, 'May Stevens', in Ordinary/Extraordinary, A Summation 1977-1984.
54. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Penguin, 1977), 162.
55. Hills, May Stevens, 43.
56. Rosa Luxemburg, cited in May Stevens, Ordinary/Extraordinary, The Artist's Book.
57. Arendt, Human Condition, 184.
58. The editorial was published on 14 January 1919. For the whole editorial
59. see http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm (accessed August 19, 2009).
60. Hills, May Stevens, 43.
61. Arendt, Human Condition, 178.
62. Hills, May Stevens, 40.
63. Stevens, The Artist's Book, in Witzling, 'May Stevens', 80.
64. Hills, May Stevens, 45.
65. Tickner, 'May Stevens'.
66. Hills, May Stevens, 38.
67. Ibid., 43.
68. Ibid., 18.
69. See, Maria Tamboukou, 'Leaving the Self, Nomadic Passages in the Memoir of a Woman Artist, Australian Feminist Studies 24, no. 61 (2009): 307-24.
70. Stevens worked as an art teacher first in High Schools, the prestigious New York High School of Music and Art amongst others till the late 1950s and then at the School of Visual Arts from 1961 to 1996, mainly on part-time contracts.
71. Hills, May Stevens, 27.
72. See Maria Tamboukou, 'Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Lines of Flight in Women Artists' Narratives, Gender and Education (forthcoming).
73. Manuel de Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006), 4.
74. Ibid., 5.
75. Hills, May Stevens, 35.
76. Ibid., 36.
77. Judith Chicago, Through the Flower (London: The Women's Press, 1982), 67. My emphasis.
78. Ibid., 78.
79. Deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, lines of flight, striated spaces and smooth spaces are central notions in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical writings, particularly elaborated in their collective work, A Thousand Plateaus. For a discussion of these concepts in relation to art/education
80. see Tamboukou, 'Machinic Assemblages'.
81. Ibid., 9.
82. Hills, May Stevens, 35.
83. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 25.
84. Scott, 'Gender', 174.
85. For a critical collection of essays on Foucault's theorisation of power
86. see Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980).
87. Gender is of course one of the multiple differences that should be considered here, alongside a multiplicity of differences apart from the well-identified and researched ones of race and social class.
88. Irigaray's question highlighted by Scott was the title of an article published in Cultural Critique in 1985: 'Is the Subject of Science Sexed?'
89. see Scott, 'Gender', 175-180).
90. Arendt, Human Condition, 173.
91. Stevens drew on her father's image in the Big Daddy series with which she worked for seven years, between 1967 and 1973. For further discussion of this work
92. see Hills, May Stevens, 33-4.
93. To get an idea of these paintings
94. see http://www.jerseycitymuseum.org/vg_disp.cfm?setcnt=1&srch_artist=&srch_medium=&srch_key=Stevens
95. I refer here to Stevens' paintings, The Artists' Studio (After Courbet), 1974; Soho Women Artists, 1977-78 and Mysteries and Politics, 1978, where Stevens portrayed herself and the community of women artists she was part of, in Rembrandt's way of large group portraits. For further discussion
96. see Hills, May Stevens, 38-42.
97. See the painting at http://www.nmwa.org/collection/portfolio.asp?LinkID=719
98. Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, 'The Problem of Women's History', in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll, cited in Scott, 'Gender', 153-4.