The In-Between of Writing: Experience and Experiment in the Work of Margaret Drabble,Margaret Duras,and Hannah Arendc By Eleanor Honig Skoller The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,1988 Under the Supervision of Professor Herbert Blau This dissertation explores the relation of women's experience and literary experiment in order to answer the question,"Why are so few women writing in the postmodern vein?"This question looms large because,in an effort to write themselves into literary history,to make a place from which they can write,to find a woman's voice and even a language,women have been writing more than ever and they have been involved with new approaches to writing and reading.Yet postmodernism (a rubric for much of the experimental prose fiction done since World War II,for much of what is new in writing)and feminism have failed to connect.It is this failure that is the locus of this exploration as it takes place in the work of three disparate women writers,Margaret Drabble,an English novelist, Marguerite Duras,a French novelist and filmaker,and Hannah Arendt,a philosopher and political theorist.What ties these writers together in this study is that each has a distinct relation to language and a close tie to world history that remains largely untreated by literary feminists. iiiThe In-Between of Writing: Experience and Experiment in the Work of Margaret Drabble, Margaret Duras, and Hannah Arenuc By Eleanor Honig Skoller The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1988 Under the Supervision of Professor Herbert Blau This dissertation explores the relation of women's experience and literary experiment in order to answer the question, "Why are so few women writing in the postmodern vein?" This question looms large because, in an effort to write themselves into literary history, to make a place from which they can write, to find a woman's voice and even a language, women have been writing more than ever and they have been involved with new approaches to writing and reading. Yet postmodernism (a rubric for much of the experimental prose fiction done since World War II, for much of what is new in writing) and feminism have failed to connect. It is this failure that is the locus of this exploration as it takes place in the work of three disparate women writers, Margaret Drabble, an English novelist, Marguerite Duras, a French novelist and filmaker, and Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist. What ties these writers together in this study is that each has a distinct relation to language and a close tie to world history that remains largely untreated by literary feminists. iii