‘I’ve Never Read Her ‘ Book Club: Language and Gender

‘I’ve Never Read Her ‘ Book Club Reading Short Fiction and Essays by Women
Meeting Wednesday 8 January 2014, 7pm. All welcome.
Reading four short extracts relating to Language and Gender, see attached PDF.

The question of gender in literary texts has been approached by linguists in two different ways. The first involves a comparison of the fiction created by male and female authors and is typified by the search for “the female sentence” or a specifically female style of writing. The second involves a study of the uses to which the linguistic gender system of different languages has been put in literary works. In the former, gender is seen as a cultural property of the author, in the latter, a morphological property of the text. A third perspective on language and gender in literary texts is provided by translators and trans- lation theorists. Translation theorists typically view a text as expressive of a particular time and place as well as being expressed in a particular language. The differences between source and target language may be accompanied by differences in culture and period, thus translators often work with both morphological gender and cultural gender.