Background
Jennifer Burwell was born on December 6, 1962, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to the family of a physician Robert Burwell and a weaver and homemaker Jean Audrey Dickey.
Jennifer Burwell studied at Queens University for the Bachelor of Arts graduating with honors in 1985.
Jennifer Burwell achieved her Master of Arts at Northwestern University in 1987.
Jennifer Burwell achieved her Doctor of Philosophy at Northwestern University in 1993.
(Notes on Nowhere was first published in 1997. Minnesota A...)
Notes on Nowhere was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The term utopia implies both "good place" and "nowhere." Since Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, debates about utopian models of society have sought to understand the implications of these somewhat contradictory definitions. In Notes on Nowhere, author Jennifer Burwell uses a cross section of contemporary feminist science fiction to examine the political and literary meaning of utopian writing and utopian thought. Burwell provides close readings of the science fiction novels of five feminist writers-Marge Piercy, Sally Gearhart, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Monique Wittig-and poses questions central to utopian writing: Do these texts promote a tradition in which narratives of the ideal society have been used to hide rather than reveal violence, oppression, and social divisions? Can a feminist critical utopia offer a departure from this tradition by using utopian narratives to expose contradiction and struggle as central aspects of the utopian impulse? What implications do these questions have for those who wish to retain the utopian impulse for emancipatory political uses? As one way of answering these questions, Burwell compares two "figures" that inform utopian writing and social theory. The first is the traditional abstract "revolutionary" subject who contradicts existing conditions and who points us to the ideal body politic. The second, "resistant," subject is partial, concrete, and produced by conditions rather than operating outside of them. In analyzing contemporary changes in the subject's relationship to social space, Burwell draws from and revises "standpoint approaches" that tie visions of social transformation to a group's position within existing conditions. By exploring the dilemmas, antagonisms, and resolutions within the critical literary feminist utopia, Burwell creates connections to a similar set of problems and resolutions characterizing "nonliterary" discourses of social transformation such as feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and Marxism.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816626391/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(How highly abstract quantum concepts were represented in ...)
How highly abstract quantum concepts were represented in language, and how these concepts were later taken up by philosophers, literary critics, and new-age gurus. The principles of quantum physics - and the strange phenomena they describe - are represented most precisely in highly abstract algebraic equations. Why, then, did these mathematically driven concepts compel founders of the field, particularly Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, to spend so much time reflecting on ontological, epistemological, and linguistic concerns? What is it about quantum concepts that appeals to latter-day Eastern mystics, poststructuralist critics, and get-rich-quick schemers? How did their interpretations and misinterpretations of quantum phenomena reveal their own priorities? In this book, Jennifer Burwell examines these questions and considers what quantum phenomena - in the context of the founders' debates over how to describe them - reveal about the relationship between everyday experience, perception, and language. Drawing on linguistic, literary, and philosophical traditions, Burwell illuminates representational and linguistic problems posed by quantum concepts - the fact, for example, that quantum phenomena exist only as probabilities or tendencies toward being and cannot be said to exist in a particular time and place. She traces the emergence of quantum theory as an analytic tool in literary criticism, in particular the use of wave/particle duality in interpretations of gender differences in the novels of Virginia Woolf and critics' connection of Bohr's Principle of Complementarity to poetic form; she examines the “quantum mysticism” of Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav; and she concludes by analyzing “nuclear discourse” in the context of quantum concepts, arguing that it, too, adopts a language of the unthinkable and the indescribable.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079SX46VG/?tag=2022091-20
2018
Jennifer Burwell was born on December 6, 1962, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to the family of a physician Robert Burwell and a weaver and homemaker Jean Audrey Dickey.
Jennifer Burwell studied at Queens University for the Bachelor of Arts graduating with honors in 1985. She achieved her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at Northwestern University in 1987 and 1993.
Jennifer Burwell started her career at Northwestern University at Evanston as an instructor in English and writing in 1989, working there up to 1993. After that, she became an instructor in a continuing education program at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto and held this position in 1994-1995. Then she was a visiting assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University, Middletown in 1996-1997. Consequently, in 1997 she returned to Ryerson Polytechnic University as an assistant professor of English and continues working there up to now. At the same time in 1994-1995, she was literacy instructor at Council Fire Native Centre and Women’s Native Resource Centre. Burwell also acted as a speaker at universities, including University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992, Ohio State University in 1994, and University of Missouri-Columbia in 1995. Burwell's first book Notes on Nowhere, was released in 1997. It is based on the dissertation she wrote at Northwestern University.
(How highly abstract quantum concepts were represented in ...)
2018(Notes on Nowhere was first published in 1997. Minnesota A...)
1997Jennifer Burwell is a feminist and a part of her first published work is directly connected with feminist literature.
Quotations: "My interest in feminist utopian literature grew out of a commitment to feminism, as well as an interest in the development of feminist critical utopias in the 1970s. These new works of utopian literature move away from the description of stable social spaces with strict boundaries between utopia and non-utopia, toward the narration of permeable social spaces that incorporate conflict and transgression into the utopian space. In my book, I explore how these critical utopias manage to deploy rather than describe utopian space in order to expose the contradictions of female identity."