Page 298 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001) surveys feminist icons since
the 18th century, situated mostly in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Showalter covers the
contributions of predominately intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and Camille Paglia. Noting popular media's importance to the perception of women and feminism
today, Showalter also discusses the contributions of popular personalities like Oprah Winfrey and
Princess Diana.
Teaching Literature (2003) is essentially a guide to teaching English literature to undergraduate
students in university. Showalter covers approaches to teaching theory, preparing syllabi and
talking about taboo subjects among many other practical topics. Showalter says that teaching
should be taken as seriously and given as much intellectual consideration as scholarship.
Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005) is a study of the Anglo-American
academic novel from the 1950s to the present.
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009)
makes a claim for a literary tradition of American women writers.

27.5 Showalter's Feminist Critique and Gynocriticism
Reading Showalter's essay "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" for the second time was really
very useful and enjoyable for me. It enabled me to understand the core ideas of this essay more
comprehensively. Not only this essay, but also Showalter's preceding essay "Toward a Feminist
Poetics" (1979). I like Showalter, she is my favorite American feminist critic. I enjoy her writings
about theory and pedagogy. Most of times I found her writings clear, persuasive, informative and
creative. While I was rereading the essay, I started to recall many thoughts about Showalter's
gynocriticism. I said what about developing these thoughts into a reading response, and I hope
this will work.
First, let start with defining Showalter's gynocriticism: it's a term adapted by Showalter for the
first time in her essay "Toward a Feminist poetics". This term stands for the study of female
literary texts by female critics. It's the study of the themes, language, styles, historical backgrounds,
and structures of literature by women. Gynocriticism has two important aims: the first, is to
construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, the second, is to develop new
models which depend on the study of the female experience, rather than to apply male models,
texts and theories. According to Showalter, the departure point of gynocriticism is feminists'
freedom from the impact of male literary history.
But before defining gynocrtiticism Showalter divides feminist criticism into two distinct types:
feminist critique and gynocriticism. She defines feminist critique as this sort of literary criticism
which is concerned with women as readers and consumers of male literature. The main aim of this
criticism is to depict how women were presented in male-produced literature. From here, we can
safely say that feminist critique and the Image of Women criticism are the same. But this sort of
criticism does not satisfy Showalter's hopes and ambitions about feminist criticism, simply because
she believes that feminist criticism should move towards the establishment of an especially female
tradition of writing . Feminists should stop searching for how women were depicted in male-
produced literature because by doing this feminists are just knowing how men want women to be,
not how women want themselves to be. Showlater is calling for a female autonomy which depicts
women's own experiences and feelings. After proving that women have a literature of their own,
to recall Showalter's sentence, through the process of rediscovering lost or neglected texts written
by women, it became a must for feminists to start constructing a female-oriented literary criticism.
So that, and as a natural result, comes Showalter's call for applying the second type of feminist
criticism which is gynocriticism. It's the criticism which is concerned with woman as a writer and
producer of literary texts. Showalter calls for applying gynocriticism because she believes that it
stands in contrast to the feminist critique's loyalty and celebration of male texts. She emphasizes
gynocriticism as a more useful approach to feminist criticism than feminist critique.
Let us move to what some other feminist critics think about gynocriticism. Some of them consider
practicing gynocriticism to be more influential not only because it concentrates on female-produced

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