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My primary teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first-century women’s literature, feminist theory, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies and queer theory. When I came to Smith in 1971 I was working on my doctoral dissertation on Arthur Rimbaud. By the time I completed it, I had shifted my research to women’s fiction of the last one hundred years. At the urging of students, I started to develop courses in women’s literature and eventually in gender studies and queer studies.

My research has focused on contemporary writers such as Jane Rule, Marguerite Duras and Monique Wittig. My books include Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction (1999) and Marguerite Duras Revisited (1993). I have also worked in collaboration with Susan Van Dyne on curriculum transformation, the theory and practice of bringing scholarship from women’s studies and ethnic studies into the liberal arts curriculum and creating a more productive learning climate for women students and all students of color in the classroom. We co-edited and contributed to Women’s Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum published in 1985. Articles have appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, the French Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Feminist Studies, and the Journal of Homosexuality.  I am currently working on a study of Canadian women writers called: “On the Edge: Canadian Women Writers at the Turn of the Century,” and on an analysis of the first decade of The Ladder, the journal published by the early lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, called “‘The Ladder, Rung by Rung’: Assimilation or Challenge?”

Books

Women's Place in the Academy by Professor Marilyn Schuster and Professor Susan Van Dyne The explosion of knowledge resulting from recent research on women and minorities has posed what has often proved to be a thorny question: How is this new knowledge to be incorporated into the existing undergraduate curriculum? Simply "adding on" to more traditional courses falls short of the task, which is to find more effective ways of achieving genuine integration with existing curricula. Schuster and Van Dyne have compiled a unique anthology of original essays that address this pressing question not only by providing the essential theoretical framework , but also by reviewing political strategies adequate to the task of bringing the liberal arts curriculum into the 21st century.

These case studies and tested strategies from colleges and universities nationwide can now receive the national attention they deserve and will be especially valued for their practical approach to the limitations of traditional college settings.

This volume will be a useful resource for teachers, administrators and anyone concerned with curriculum development and the quality of undergraduate education in our schools.  

Marguerite Duras Revisited by Professor Marilyn Schuster  Marguerite Duras, revered by some and reviled by others, has become a monument in contemporary French letters. The immense popular success of The Lover, translated into over thirty languages and a best seller in the U.S. as well as France, established Duras internationally as a novelist of desire who both confirms and challenges the erotic impulses of her readers. The Lover,  however, is an integral part of five decades of fiction in which Duras returns obsessively to stories, themes and traumatic scenes seeking to exorcise pain and discover new meanings. Her work elicits a special interest at this moment in literary history because she borrows from her childhood in colonial Indochina and interrogates her experience as a woman.

In Marguerite Duras Revisited, Marilyn R. Schuster studies the writer's fictions and films in the context of her life and culture. She traces the evolution of Duras' narrative strategies from her early realist texts in the forties, her "new novel" experiments in the fifties and sixties and her filmmaking in the eighties and nineties. While not claiming that Duras is a feminist writer, Schuster proposes a feminist reading of her work, arguing that a woman's story is always at the center of Duras' narrative. Duras simultaneously exposes and is complicit with an ideology of gender, power and desire in which woman is "other" to man. Drawing on American feminist criticism, cultural studies, and queer theory, Schuster maintains that the figures of the colonial subject, the Jew, and the homosexual in Duras' writing are intrinsically linked to her inscription of feminine subjectivity.   

Passionate Communities by Professor Marilyn Schuster In this first full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists dominant discourses of gender and sexuality - both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures.

From her earliest 1964 novel, Desert of the Heart, Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal encounters with the author to elicit the ways in which Rule interrogates the meanings and politics of sexuality, the relationship between sexuality and language, and the stakes of communities in individual claims on identity.