Annette Kolodny Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Her books won many awards both in the United States and abroad. Over the course of her scholarly career, Kolodny has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and others. She retired from the University of Arizona in July 2007 and has continued an active professional life as a consultant in higher education policy issues and as a scholar of American literature and culture. She died on September 11, 2019 in Tucson, Arizona.

Kolodny was born in New York City. Capping what was already a long and distinguished career, in 2012 Annette Kolodny published In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press). The influential magazine Indian Country Today immediately named it as one of the 12 most important books in Native American Studies published in 2012. The Western Literature Association awarded the book the Thomas Lyon Prize as “the best book in Western literary and cultural studies published in 2012.” Professor Kolodny had earlier made her mark in the field of Native American Studies with the publication of the long-lost 1893 masterpiece of Native American literature, Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (Duke University Press, 2007). This new edition included an interpretive analysis of Nicolar’s text as well as a fascinating history of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. These two latest books mark the culmination of a scholarly career that began with studies of the American frontiers and moved into breakthrough examinations of trans-Atlantic contacts between Europeans and Native Americans.

In 2007, Kolodny published a long-lost masterpiece of Native American literature, Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (Duke University Press), originally published in 1893. Nicolar’s work traces the history of his people, the Penobscot Nation, from the first moments of creation through the arrival of the white man. Kolodny’s reprint of this important work includes a history of the Penobscot Nation and an interpretive introduction to the text. It was stipulated that the royalties from this text go to the Penobscot. In 2012, Kolodny published In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press). A major contribution to the field of American Studies, this book examines both Native American and Euroamerican stories of first contacts between the peoples of the New and Old Worlds. It examines the competition between Leif Eiriksson and Christopher Columbus for the title of “first discoverer”.

Kolodny’s 1998 book is not a work of literary criticism, but rather one of institutional criticism. After serving as dean of Humanities for five years at the University of Arizona, Kolodny wrote this book in order to outline some of the problems facing academic institutions. These include the ability of legislators and administrators to make uninformed decisions about budget cuts without realizing the effect of such cuts on quality education; a myriad of problems about tenure and promotions processes, which Kolodny believes still reflect an attitude antagonistic to women or ethnic minorities; a problem with anti-feminist and anti-intellectual harassment; the lack of support available for students with children; the extent to which women and non-whites are still considered outsiders on university campuses; and the effect of an outdated curriculum in the face of greater demographic diversity and changing student learning needs. She outlines a number of changes which can be made to improve conditions and, realizing that any substantial change will require equally substantial money, encourages government reinvestment in higher education.

In 1993 she was elected to lifetime membership in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Kolodny taught at several universities, including the University of Maryland and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before being named Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Following her tenure as dean, which spanned from 1988 to 1993, Kolodny was named College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona. She was a Professor Emerita of Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Several authors have criticized “Dancing Through the Minefield”. The most well-known of these criticisms appeared in a collaborative article Kolodny wrote with Judith Gardiner, Elly Bulkin, and Rena Patterson entitled “An Interchange on Feminist Criticism: On ‘Dancing Through the Minefield’”, which was published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1983.

Kolodny is also well known for two essays published in 1980: “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism” (Feminist Studies, Spring 1980) and “A Map for Re-Reading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts” (New Literary History, Spring 1980). Of these, “Dancing Through the Minefield” is the most well-known, and has been called “the most reprinted essay of American feminist literary criticism”. It has been translated and reprinted worldwide.

Perhaps her best known work, Kolodny’s 1980 essay “Dancing Through the Minefield” was the “first work to attempt both a survey of the first ten years of feminist literary inquiry and an analysis of the informing theoretical propositions”. It has been the subject of criticism in the years since its initial publication, but can still be seen as a guide to “feminist concerns and methodologies.”

In New Hampshire, she wrote her first major work of feminist eco-criticism, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975). While the book got positive reviews and pioneered the field of feminist ecocriticism, Kolodny was denied promotion and tenure in the English Department at the University of New Hampshire. (Richter 1387) Active in the student movements while in Berkeley, she continued to advocate for the right to establish a program in women’s studies. She later sued the University of New Hampshire charging sex discrimination and anti-Semitism. She settled with the “largest financial award in history in a case of this kind”. She used this money to establish the Legal Fund of the Task Force on Discrimination for the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), an organization she had helped found, and served as director of the task force from 1980 to 1985. The Task Force is now renamed Feminists Against Academic Discrimination within the NWSA.

Kolodny’s first two books were The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (University of North Carolina Press, 1975) and The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984); both of these texts deal with environmental concerns and the historic destruction of the land (Jay 217). Based on her experience as a senior administrator in higher education, Kolodny published Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press, 1998), which “details the extent to which women and non-white students are still outsiders on American campuses.” The book also examines the status of the humanities disciplines in higher education, the value of tenure, and the need for family friendly policies on campus. It is a book about needed educational innovations in the twenty-first century.

Kolodny was born in New York City to Esther Rifkind Kolodny and David Kolodny. She did her undergraduate work at Brooklyn College, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude in 1962. After graduation, she took a position on the editorial staff at Newsweek. Kolodny left to return to graduate studies in 1964, citing a desire “to teach people to think critically and because she wanted to be able to publish her own ideas, not merely report the ideas of others.” Her M.A. and Ph.D. work were completed at the University of California, Berkeley, and she earned the latter degree in 1969. Her first teaching position at Yale University was cut short as she left after a year to move to Canada with her husband, whose draft board appeal for conscientious objector status for the duration of the Vietnam War was rejected. Finding a position at the University of British Columbia, she helped develop western Canada’s first accredited interdisciplinary women’s studies program before returning to the United States in 1974 to teach at the University of New Hampshire.

Annette Kolodny (August 21, 1941 – September 11, 2019) was an American feminist literary critic and activist, held the position of College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her major scholarly writings examined the experiences of women on the American frontiers and the projection of female imagery onto the American landscape. Her other writings examined some aspects of feminism after the 1960s; the revision of dominant themes in American studies; and the problems faced by women and minorities in the American academy.

The book is organized chronologically, in much the same way as Lay of the Land. The first section is titled “Book One: From Captivity to Accommodation, 1630-1833”, and traces the writings of and about women as they moved from captivity both literal (Mary Rowlandson’s account of being captured by Native Americans) and figurative (the sense of being forcibly confined in a new and strange land) to adaptation in the form of survival skills, such as those reputedly possessed by Rebecca Boone, the wife of Daniel Boone. Book two, “From Promotion to Literature, 1833–1850”, follows attempts to encourage women to move westward by male writers to western narratives by the women themselves. The third and final section, “Book Three: Repossessing Eden, 1850–1860”, documents the attempts by women to create a familiar order in a still unfamiliar country.