Review
American writer and essayist, Joanna Russ was known for her science fiction and fantasy novels and stories, as well as for her essays and social activism dedicated to feminism. As a professor at the University of Washington, Russ won through her career important prizes such as Hugo, Nebula, James Tiptree Jr., or Locus Award, among others. The Female Man is her most iconic book, considered today a masterpiece of feminist literature.
Justifications
- Joanna Russ is a reference in science fiction literature as one of the first women to enter that literary world.
- She is an active feminist who shows in her works the oppression that women receive in artistic terms.
- She was nominated for the 2013 Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Biography
Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, in New York City. Her parents, Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, were both teachers. She starts writing fiction at a very young age. Over the years, she fills countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics, and illustrations, often bound by hand.
As a senior at William Howard Taft Institute, Russ was selected in the top ten of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov in 1957, and received a MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. After teaching at several universities, including Cornell, she becomes a full-time professor at the University of Washington. Russ became known in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, particularly for her nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. At the time, science fiction was dominated by authors writing for a predominantly male audience, but women were increasingly entering the field.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Russ> Retrieved on 14/04/2022
Works
She is the author of several works of science fiction, fantasy, and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983).
Her most famous work is The Female Man (1970), a novel that combines satire and utopian fiction, which can be read either as a novel or as a theoretical text.
Bibliography
Didactic approach
- Her texts can be used in English lessons.
- She can also be used in Language and Literature lessons to work on the different literary genres. It is important to bring students closer to the reading written by women of a genre that has been constantly attributed to men and that, however, through figures such as Joanna Russ, has a female representative.
Documents
