Page 308 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes • Elan Showalter, in her essay Feminist Criticism in Wilderness (1985) defines and explores
the development of women centered criticism which chiefly evaluated the women’s writing
as expression of women’s experience. She says that “If in 1981, Feminist literary critics are
still wandering in the wilderness, we are in good company; for, as Geoffrey Hartman tells us,
all criticism is in the wilderness” but quoting Geoffrey she says all criticism is in wilderness
today. She says, in Feminine Criticism had been no theoretical basis and it has been “an
empirical orphn in the theoretical models that explore the difference between the androcentric
and gynocentric criticism. These models are biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.
The cultural model provides a more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity
and difference of women’s writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or
psychoanalysis...”
• 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-as-sign 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 howwe can begin to see and name and
therefore live-afresh.
• The second mode of Feminist Criticism engendered by this process is the study of women as
writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by
women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective
female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition. English Feminist
Criticism, which incorporates French Feminist and Marxist theory but is more traditionally
oriented to textual interpretation, is also moving toward a focus on women’s writing. Third
mode is Organic or biological Criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference,
of a text indelibly marked by the body: anatomy is textually. Biological criticism is also one
of the most sibylling and perplexing theoretical formulations of Feminst Criticism. Simply to
invoke anatomy risks a return to the crude essentialism, the phallic and ovarian theories of
art, that oppressed women in the past. Some redical Feminist Critics, primarily in France but
also in the United States, insist that we must read these metaphors as more than playful, that
we must serioudly rethink and redifine biological differentiation and its relation to women’s
unity. They argue that “women’s writing proceeds from the body, that our sexual
differentiation is also our source.” The difference of woman’s literary practice, therefore,
must be sought (in Miller’s words) in “the body of her writing and not the writing of her
body.”
• Last mode is Linguistic and textual theories of women’s writing ask whether men and women
use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms
of biology, socialization, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own;
and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked. 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 notes 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.
• All Feminist Criticism is in some sense revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted
concetual structures, and indeed most contemporary American criticism claims to be revisionist
too. The most exciting and comprehensive case for this “revisionary imperative” is made by

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