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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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