How do you create a viable tradition?

I wanted to explore how Campbell's theories on agency in "Agency; Promiscuous and Protean"  speak to Gilbert and Gubar's theories on agency in "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship."

First, I would like to point to Campbell's third definition of agency: "techne understood broadly is linked to iteration with a difference and with citation that exploits the past, and opens up possibilities for resistance. Here is the agency of stylized repetition that has ironic overtones; the citation that appropriates and alters. Agency emerges out of performances or actions that, when repeated, fix meaning through sedimentation. Agency equally emerges in performances that repeat with a difference, altering meaning. "

This definition of agency reminds me both of Burke, and Gilbert and Gubar. Burke claims "proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations" and these "strategies" inform what kind of  "attitude" would best be appropriated in a given "situation" (296) This is similar to Campbell's claims on "meaning through sedimentation." A certain phrase which proposes an attitude is repeated to the point that it becomes a  tool to be used in dealing with a situation--a proverb. Campbell agrees with this idea that repetition is a device used to make phrases and literary works into usable tools; a phrase may not have comprehensible literal meanings, but after being repeated enough times, it can become common knowledge and therefore accepted as a universal symbol for an action or situation. Campbell, however, adds further onto Burke's idea. Campbell says agency is created when a form is repeated and disrupted. For instance, I read a sonnet once where the author used the strict rules of the poetic form, but the content of the poems were disjointed images of violence. The poet repeated the form but altered the expected content therefore "altering [the] meaning" of the sonnet and its capabilities. In relation to Gilbert and Gubar, I want to look particularly at Campbell's idea that certain repetitions can "exploit the past, and open up possibilities for resistance."

I would like to look closely of Gilbert and Gubar using the following three statements: "all these phenomena of 'inferiorization' mark the woman writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart" and "women writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture which has its own distinctive literary traditions, even--though it defines itself in relation to the 'main', male-dominated literary culture" and "today's female writers feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging."

Campbell might say that women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed agency in their works by repeating the forms passed down to them by male antecedents (borrowing from the male literary tradition) and altering that form in some new way exclusive to female writers. This was the female writers was of "exploiting the past, and opening up possibilities for resistance." They repeat the traditional female angelic character but also through in a disruptive mad woman. Gilbert and Gubar claim that the struggles of these women helped contemporary female writers to create "a viable tradition."

I guess this brings me to ask what is the meaning of "a viable tradition"? Would we say that Bronte and Austen's repetition  and disruption of male-created literary forms is a "claiming" of agency (the struggle), and the tradition in which contemporary female writers compose is the product of that struggle, agency claimed? If a disruption of classic literary form is an emergence of agency, then eighteenth and nineteenth century authors possessed agency in their works. Are contemporary female writers, then, disrupting their female antecedents? As I understood it, Gilbert and Gubar were saying that contemporary female writers were "answering" their antecedents' pleas for agency in their writing. Could we say that one set of authors merely has a greater degree of agency? Nineteenth and eighteenth century authors disrupted the tradition form. Do contemporary female writers completely reject it? No angels or muses exist in their works?

It's hard for me to quite pull together what I'm trying to ask, but let me try.  According to Campbell, agency comes out of repetition of literary tradition and disruption of tradition. Contemporary female writers are not disrupting a tradition; they are creating a new one entirely. Eighteenth and nineteenth century writers disrupted male tradition and therefore claimed agency. They gave contemporary writers the power to write as they pleased.

I suppose I'm saying that it seems to me, in order to create a new tradition, agency must first be claimed from the old traditions by antecedents. Then, contemporary writers are free to use that agency. It becomes a co-construction between the past and present. Contemporary writers may have created the new tradition, but their antecedents provided the means.

I think I'm having a hard time thinking that a new tradition can really be possible with nothing borrowed from the male tradition. What really makes this tradition a "new" tradition?

OK, well, I think I've argued myself into confusion enough  for one post.