Sacred space, memory space

Photo by Paul Martens

Susan Gubar (left) and Mary Jo Weaver

Mary Jo Weaver and Susan Gubar, both professors on the IU Bloomington campus, have been friends for decades. This autumn, both will have books published by the IU Press; both works are departures of a sort from the work for which they each are known.

As a religious studies professor, Weaver has become a well-known commentator on the history and politics of institutional Catholicism. New Catholic Women (rev. ed., 1995) and Springs of Water in a Dry Land (1992) explored historical issues and spiritual questions raised by feminists in the American Catholic church.

Gubar, a Distinguished Professor of English, came to prominence as a feminist and literary critic with the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination, co-written by Sandra Gilbert; the work was a runner-up for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. Six years later, she and her collaborator received a Ms. Woman of the Year award for their compilation of the Norton Anthology of Literature of Women, a work that appeared in a revised second edition in 1996. Gilbert and Gubar’s trilogy, No Man’s Land used feminist criticism to understand the achievements of British and American literary women in modern times. Gubar’s first solo work, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997.

Weaver’s new book, Cloister and Community: Life within a Carmelite Monastery, will be published next week, and Gubar’s Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew will follow in November.

Weaver, who has been a friend and frequent visitor to the Carmelites for some 12 years, credits that affiliation for contributing to her personal well-being. In the book, she explores concepts of sacred space, both architectural and spiritual, while chronicling the history of the Carmelites with the life of 16th-century Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Avila.

Poetry After Auschwitz has its roots in the personal as well. Gubar contemplates her own family history while addressing the work of contemporary poets grappling with the consequences of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust as "proxy-witnesses" of events that they did not experience firsthand.