FEMINIST CRITICISM

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FEMINIST CRITICISM

• Examining the Implications of History, Reception,
  Biography
• 8 10 March 2005

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REVIEW - SELF CHECKLIST

• Name some texts in which miscegenation is evident
  (miscegenation is mixture of races, esp.
  marriage or cohabitation between a white person
  and a member of another race). Why is noting
  this important enough for women writers to
  record?
• Why might Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British
  poet, have felt guilty about the slave trade?
  She was not herself an owner of slaves, nor was
  her family. Why then?
• What are the characteristics of a
  nineteenth-century poetess? Why is it important
  to recognize the elements of a composite
  biography?
• What does Margaret Fuller regard as important
  about womens status in the nineteenth century?
  What does she want to change?
• What is the wife lamenting? (416-418)
• What did Aphra Behn write and why are those texts
  important?
• How do Phillis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet
  compare as American poets? Whats different
  about their situations and how is that reflected
  in their poems?
• Whats important about recovering the writings of
  Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe?

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Elaine ShowalterFeminist Criticism in the
Wilderness

• Witty dialogue between Carolyn Heilbrun
  Catharine Stimpson about modes of feminist
  criticism
• FIRST MODE righteous, angry, and admonitory,
  looking for the sins and errors of the past
  (compared to the Old Testament)
• SECOND MODE disinterested and seeking the
  grace of the imagination (compared to the New
  Testament)
• BOTH Necessary only the Jeremiahs of ideology
  can lead us out of the Egypt of female
  servitude to the promised land of humanism
• Connection to Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century
  British philosopher, who thought literary critics
  might perish in the wilderness before reaching
  the promised land of disinterestedness
• Wilderness of theory, which we too must make our
  home

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• Feminist criticism originated not from a
  theoretical basis but from an empirical one
• empirical based on observation or experience
• theoretical analyzing a set of facts in their
  relation to one another and also in relation to
  hypotheses about their meaning
• Annette Kolodny observing feminist criticism
  appeared more like set of interchangeable
  strategies than any coherent school or shared
  goal orientation. (1976)
• Black critics protesting massive silence of
  feminist criticism about black and Third World
  women writers, calling for a black feminist
  aesthetic dealing with both racial and sexual
  politics
• Marxist feminists noting that class (as well as
  gender) is a crucial determinant of literary
  production
• Literary historians seeking to uncover a lost
  tradition
• Deconstructionists seeking to synthesize a
  literary criticism that is both textual and
  feminist
• Freudian Lacanian critics want to theorize
  about womens relationship to language and
  signification

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• Pitfalls of false objectivity (354) Virginia
  Woolf, recalling how she had been locked out of
  the university library, the symbolic sanctuary of
  the male logos (reason, controlling principle of
  the universe), noted that while it is unpleasant
  to be locked out. . .it is worse, perhaps, to be
  locked in.
• Conditions necessary for optimizing knowledge
  production
• objective knowledge is NOT static, NOT a
  single, asituated, master perspective that bases
  its claims to objectivity in the closure of
  controversy
• objective knowledge is achieved through
  multiple, located, partial perspectives that
  find their objective character through ongoing
  processes of debate.
• critical vision is parallactic rather than
  unidimensional
• Locus of objectivity not an established body of
  knowledge. . .produced or owned by anyone, but
  knowledges in dynamic production, reproduction
  and transformation, for which we are all
  responsible.

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• By contrast, the hieratic models of the master
  perspective do not acknowledge how layered and
  intertwined are the relations of human practice
  and technical artifact and how monolithic
  notions of knowledge and reality tend to obstruct
  rather than facilitate intellectual connections,
  treating knowledge and intellectual works as
  finished. . .achievements rather than as
  ongoing research activities and part of a
  process of accretion of information synthesis,
  part of midrash, as it were (Lucy Suchman,
  Located Accountabilities in Technology
  Production. Published by the Department of
  Sociology, Lancaster University. Online.
  Available http//www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology
  /soc039ls.html)

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• Systems of classification (and of
  standardization) form a juncture of social
  organization, moral order, and layers of
  technical integration. Each subsystem inherits,
  increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the
  installed bases of systems that have come before
  (Sorting Things Out Classification and Its
  Consequences Bowker Star 33).
• There is more at stake epistemologically,
  politically, and ethically in the day-to-day
  work of building classification systems and
  producing and maintaining standards than in
  abstract arguments about representation (Bowker
  Star 10).
• Crucial principles of intellectual inquiry
• to understand the role of invisibility in the
  work that classification does in ordering human
  interaction
• to keep an eye on the moral and ethical agenda
  in our querying of these systems. Each standard
  and each category valorizes some point of view
  and silences another. This is not inherently a
  bad thing indeed it is inescapable (Bowker
  Star 5).

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• Standards and categories become problematic when
  they are
• insufficiently critiqued
• and when, a folk theory of categorization
  itself prevails. That folk theory says that
  things come in well-defined kinds, that the kinds
  are characterized by shared properties, and that
  there is one right taxonomy of the kinds (George
  Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things What
  Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago
  London University of Chicago Press, 121).

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• ALWAYS IMPORTANT TO ASK
• How did the texts or knowledge come into being?
• Who MADE the texts, who made the knowledge under
  study?
• For what purposes were the texts, the knowledge
  made?
• Feminists have tended to
• Be suspicious of monolithic systems
• Reject scientism
• Scientific literary criticism aims to purge
  itself of the subjective
• Feminist criticism reasserts the authority of
  experience
• Evolutions in feminist criticism result in
  recognizing the importance of theory, theory that
  is not simply responding to androcentric, or
  male-centered formulations of the world, but is
  female-centered

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness contd

• Feminist as reader, producing feminist readings
  of texts
• Images and stereotypes of women in literature
• Omissions and misconceptions about women in
  criticism (Omissions are not accidents. --
  Marianne Moore)
• Woman-as-sign in semiotic systems
• Feminist critique
• 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 being to see and
  name--and therefore live--afresh. (Adrienne Rich,
  When We Dead Awaken)
• All feminist criticism is in some sense
  revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted
  conceptual structures feminist criticism wants
  to decode and demystify all the disguised
  questions and answers that have always shadowed
  the connections between textuality and sexuality,
  genre and gender, psychosexual identity and
  cultural authority (Sandra Gilbert, What Do
  Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the
  Volcano)
• Importance of establishing some basic conceptual
  tools

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
contdShowalters Call for a Feminist
CriticismWomen-Centered, Independent,
Intellectually Coherent

• Defining the Feminine Gynocritics and the
  Womans Text
• Womens Writing and Womans Body
• Womens Writing and Womens Language
• Womens Writing and Womans Psyche
• Womens Writing and Womens Culture

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THE HIGHS LOWS OFBLACK FEMINIST
CRITICISMBarbara Christian

• Begins by situating her own observations in
  relation to Alice Walkers In Search of Our
  Mothers Gardens (323)
• Study Tips Did you read/review Walkers essay as
  soon as your saw Christians reference?
• Walker turning the idea of ART and notions of
  high and low on their heads
• IN THE HIGH WORLD Discourse, theory, the canon,
  the body, the boys (preferably Lacan, Derrida,
  and Foucault) before the girls linguistics, the
  authority of the critic, the exclusion of
  creative writings (as theory or philosopy)
• IN THE MIDDLE WORLD Reading the texts, sometimes
  of creative writers negotiating between
  advancement and appreciation tropes, research,
  discourse narrative strategies the race for
  theory
• IN THE LOW WORLD Stories, poems, plays. The
  language of folk.

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THE HIGHS LOWS OFBLACK FEMINIST
CRITICISMBarbara Christian

• CONCLUSION Much of course can be learned from
  all of us who speak, read, write, including those
  of us who look high. But as we look high, we
  might also look low, lest we devalue women in the
  world even as we define Woman. In ignoring their
  voices, we may not only truncate our movement but
  we may also limit our own process until our
  voices no longer sound like womens voices to
  anyone. (Longman 352)