College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Changing world

English's Brenda Daly thinks it may be time to move on to another cause.
There was a time, Brenda Daly says, that the curriculum in most high schools and colleges failed to include women authors.

Occasionally Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf or Mary Shelley might be discussed, but the important cultural significance of literature by women wasn't understood.

Thirty years ago Daly was part of a movement that argued that there were valuable women authors - of different races, classes, and sexual orientations - that should be included in the canon along with writers such as Melville, Steinbeck and Hawthorne.

"They have something to say about our culture,' Daly said, "and it comes from another perspective. Since women authors were seldom taught in literature courses, women readers rarely had the opportunity to imagine themselves as authors of their lives or stories."

Daly has been at the forefront of the movement to change that. She is a frequent speaker at regional, national and international conferences. She is the author of Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates, where she examines the relationship between undemocratic social conventions and linguistic codes, while also calling attention to Oates' strategies of resistance.

In her autobiography, Authoring a Life: A Woman's Survival in and through Literary Studies, Daly explains that her life was transformed through feminist approaches to the study of women's literature.

She has received national recognition by demonstrating, through the use of the personal in scholarship, the importance of reading and writing in women's lives and by conducting and publishing classroom research on effective teaching.

Her research efforts were recognized last spring when the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences named Daly a recipient of the college’s award for Outstanding Achievement in Research/Artistic Creativity. This award is given annually to LAS faculty members for their national or international reputations for contributions in research, and who have influenced the research activities of students.

These days, however, Daly wonders if her work is done.

"While we still need more recognition of white women authors, we need to continue our efforts to teach literature by people of color," she said. "We now have a much more diverse curriculum in literary studies than there was 30 years ago. We have reached a point where we can look at most college curricula and say that white women authors are included. We can’t say that yet about writers of color, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation."

That's not to say that Daly has totally given up work on women's scholarship. She was recently named editor of the prestigious interdisciplinary publication, the NWSA Journal (National Women's Studies Association), which will be housed at Iowa State from 2003-08.

And Daly has started to focus her research efforts on photography and narrative, particularly photos included in memoirs or novels. She is currently working on a book on photography, tentatively entitled Lost Albums. She is interested in the effects, both positive and negative, of visual and verbal forms of representation on how people "picture" their lives.

Ironically, Daly says, photography as a practice, holds little interest for her.

"One of the reasons why I am so fascinated by photography is that I can't do it," she said. "Whether I’m traveling or visiting with a grandchild, I want to be immersed in the occasion, not distanced from it while trying to document it."