SOURCE: Barr, Marlene. “Food for Postmodern Thought: Isak Dinesen's Female Artists as Precursors to Contemporary Feminist Fabulators.”¹ In Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, pp. 21-33. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Barr theorizes on the importance of Isak Dinesen's works as precursors to postmodern feminist writing.

In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson comments, “I am very far indeed from believing that any of the most significant postmodern artists—John Cage, John Ashbery, Philippe Sollers, Robert Wilson, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Michael Snow, even Samuel Beckett himself—are in any sense schizophrenics” (118). My purpose in citing Jameson is not to take issue with his statement, but rather to make a simple observation: his list of “the most significant postmodern artists” does not include female postmodern artists. As we are all aware by now, women are omitted from...