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Literary Criticism and Theories



                  Notes          literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school
                                 or shared goal orientation." Since then, the expressed goals have not been notably unified. Black
                                 critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism about black and Third-World women
                                 writers and call for a black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual politics.
                                 Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with gender as a crucial determinant of literary
                                 production. Literary historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in deconstructionist
                                 methodologies wish to "synthesize a literary criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian
                                 and Lacanian critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and signification.
                                 An early obstacle to constructing a theoretical framework for feminist criticism was the
                                 unwillingness of many women to limit or bound an expressive and dynamic enterprise. The
                                 openness of feminist criticism appealed particularly to Americans who perceived the structuralist,
                                 post-structuralist, and deconstructionist debates of the 1970s as arid and falsely objective, the
                                 epitome of a pernicious masculine discourse from which many feminists wished to escape. Recalling
                                 in A Room of One's Own how she had been prohibited from entering the university library, the
                                 symbolic sanctuary of the male logos, Virginia Woolf wisely observed that while it is "unpleasant
                                 to be locked out ... it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." Advocates of the antitheoretical position
                                 traced their descent from Woolf and from other feminist visionaries, such as Mary Daly, Adrienne
                                 Rich, and Marguerite Duras, who had satirized the sterile narcissism of male scholarship and
                                 celebrated women's fortunate exclusion from its patriarchal methodolatry. Thus for some, feminist
                                 criticism was an act of resistance to theory, a confrontation with existing canons and judgments,
                                 what Josephine Donovan calls "a mode of negation within a fundamental dialectic." As Judith
                                 Fetterley declared in her book, The Resisting Reader, feminist criticism has been characterized by "a
                                 resistance to codification and a refusal to have its parameters prematurely set." I have discussed
                                 elsewhere, with considerable sympathy, the suspicion of monolithic systems and the rejection of
                                 scientism in literary study that many feminist critics have voiced. While scientific criticism struggled
                                 to purge itself of the subjective, feminist criticism reasserted the authority of experience.
                                 Yet it now appears that what looked like a theoretical impasse was actually an evolutionary phase.
                                 The ethics of awakening have been succeeded, at least in the universities, by a second stage
                                 characterized by anxiety about the isolation of feminist criticism from a critical community
                                 increasingly theoretical in its interests and indifferent to women's writing. The question of how
                                 feminist criticism should define itself with relation to the new critical theories and theorists has
                                 occasioned sharp debate in Europe and the United States. Nina Auerbach has noted the absence of
                                 dialogue and asks whether feminist criticism itself must accept responsibility:
                                      Feminist critics seem particularly reluctant to define themselves to the uninitiated.
                                      There is a sense in which our sisterhood has become too powerful; as a school, our
                                      belief in ourself is so potent that we decline communication with the networks of
                                      power and respectability we say we want to change.
                                 But rather than declining communication with these networks, feminist criticism has indeed spoken
                                 directly to them, in their own media: PMLA, Diacritics, Glyph, Tel Quel, New Literary History,
                                 and Critical Inquiry. For the feminist critic seeking clarification, the proliferation of communiques
                                 may itself prove confusing.
                                 There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism, and to conflate them (as most commentators
                                 do) is to remain permanently bemused by their theoretical potentialities. The first mode is
                                 ideological; it is concerned with the feminist as reader, and it offers feminist readings of texts
                                 which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions
                                 about women in criticism, and woman-assign in semiotic systems. This is not all feminist reading
                                 can do; it can be a liberating intellectual act, as Adrienne Rich proposes:
                                      A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all
                                      as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine
                                      ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of
                                      naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and
                                      name—and therefore live—afresh.
                                 This invigorating encounter with literature, which I will call feminist reading or the feminist
                                 critique, is in essence a mode of interpretation, one of many which any complex text will



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