Feminist Literary Criticism
Feminist literary criticism examines how literature reflects and perpetuates the oppression of women, and seeks to challenge and change these representations. It focuses on analyzing the portrayal of female characters, the role of gender in storytelling, and the influence of patriarchal norms on literary works. This approach aims to uncover and address gender biases and inequalities in literature.
8 Key excerpts on "Feminist Literary Criticism"
eBook - ePub- Ben Agger(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Spon Press(Publisher)
...It seems that every other MLA paper is about feminist criticism and feminist theory. It is clear that feminist theory is anchored in the feminist critical project as it is played out in English and literature programs (e.g., see Kolodny, 1975, 1980, 1984; Felman, 1985, 1987). Although feminist theorists and critics can be found across the humanities and social sciences, they are clustered in the literary disciplines not least because the feminist critical project concerns itself with issues of male cultural hegemony. Feminist cultural studies is broader than Feminist Literary Criticism. Nevertheless, many of the most important critical approaches in feminist cultural analysis follow from the textual-critical activities of people like Millett, Felman and Kolodny. If cultural studies treats culture as a text, the impetus for this sort of textual criticism originally came from engagements with real texts, including fiction and poetry. It was natural for Millett to begin with a discussion of women writers and the depiction of women in male literature inasmuch as literary culture, at least until the 1950s, was a primary form of public culture. Although movies have become increasingly popular since the 1920s, the Hollywoodization of film culture did not take place until after World War Two, paralleling the emerging significance of television in mass culture. Up until then, novels were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural imagery about gender relations as well as appropriate gender values. The representation of women, by women and men writers, mattered greatly for the way people came to think about gender relations. Hence, as Millett demonstrates, the feminist critique of patriarchal literary culture was an extremely significant component of the development of feminist consciousness in general. The role of feminist criticism in the nascent women’s movement (see Evans, 1980) cannot be underestimated...
eBook - ePubBeginning theory
An introduction to literary and cultural theory: Fourth edition
- Peter Barry(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...They seem to accept the conventions of literary realism, and treat literature as a series of representations of women's lives and experience which can be measured and evaluated against reality. They see the close reading and explication of individual literary texts as the major business of feminist criticism. Generally, this kind of feminist criticism has a good deal in common with the procedures and assumptions of the liberal humanist approach to literature, although feminists also place considerable emphasis on the use of historical data and non-literary material (such as diaries, memoirs, social and medical history) in understanding the literary text. The American critic Elaine Showalter is usually taken as the major representative of this approach, but other exemplars would be Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Patricia Stubbs, and Rachel Brownstein. However, most of these are in fact American rather than ‘Anglo’, and this should make us question the usefulness of this widely accepted category. English feminist criticism is, after all, often distinctly different from American: it tends to be ‘socialist feminist’ in orientation, aligned with cultural materialism or Marxism, so that it is obviously unsatisfactory to try to assimilate it into a ‘non-theoretical’ category. The existence of this kind of feminism has been rather obscured by the fact that certain popular books summarising feminist criticism (like K. K. Ruthven's Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction and Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics) do not discuss it as a distinct category. Examples of this kind of work are: Terry Lovell's Consuming Fiction (1987), Julia Swindells's Victorian Writing and Working Women (1985), and Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986) by Cora Kaplan, an American who worked in Britain for many years...
- Maggie Humm(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the 1970s feminist criticism moved into a new phase – gynocriticism, or the study of women writers – with the first anthology of Feminist Literary Criticism_ Images of Women in Fiction (Cornillon, 1972). Annis Pratt, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Alice Walker were rediscovering many neglected women writers while Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1977) gave shape to a tradition of women’s literature. Although it was attacked in the 1980s for its partial racism, homophobia and idiosyncratic choices, Literary Women was one of the first texts of feminist criticism to give women writers a history, describe women’s choices of literary expression, and to make an identificatory celebration of the power of women writers: ‘There is no point saying what women cannot do in literature, for history shows they have done it all’ (Moers, 1977, p. xiii). The need to replace masculinist values with a new form of feminist criticism was the task of Josephine Donovan’s Feminist Literary Criticism (1975). The volume is a good example of the diversity of feminist approaches at that time, ranging as it does across bibliographies, linguistic research, and the retrieval of feminist literary mothers (Woolf). While Feminist Literary Criticism remains time bound in its focus on androgyny or integrated sex-roles (although Donovan herself preferred the term ‘cultural’ feminism) the book prophetically included a vivid femmes de lettres, or dialogue, between Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson – a form which has come to revolutionise feminist criticism, as in Audre Lorde’s ‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly’. A constant theme in feminist writing in this period is the issue of communication, as the titles of feminist books make clear: Tillie Olsen’s Silences and Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language. The need to explore a separate, distinctive woman’s language and to establish a body of literary criticism were the vital work of this decade...
eBook - ePub- Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This means that liberation will not come merely from changes in culture. Second, the ideology of gender affects the way the writings of men and women are read and how canons of excellence are established. Third, feminist critics must take account of the fictional nature of literary texts and not indulge in ‘rampant moralism’ by condemning all male authors for the sexism of their books (vide Millett) and approving all women authors for raising the issue of gender. Texts have no fixed meanings: interpretations depend on the situation and ideology of the reader. Nevertheless, women can and should try to assert their influence upon the way in which gender is defined and represented culturally. In the Introduction to Feminist Criticism and Social Change (1985), Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt argue for a materialist feminist criticism which escapes the ‘tragic’ essentialism of those feminist critics who project an image of women as universally powerless and universally good. They criticize what they consider the narrow literariness of Gilbert and Gubar’s influential The Madwoman in the Attic (1979: see below), and especially their neglect of the social and economic realities which play an important part in constructing gender roles. Penny Boumehla, Cora Kaplan and members of the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective have instead brought to literary texts the kind of ideological analysis developed by Althusser and Macherey (see Chapter 5), in order to understand the historical formation of gender categories. However, Marxist feminism currently does not have the highest of profiles – no doubt because of the political ‘condition’ of postmodernity, but also perhaps because of the overriding effect of the ‘debate’ between Anglo-American and French feminisms. Elaine Showalter: gynocriticism Toril Moi’s Sexual / Textual Politics (1985) is in two main sections: ‘Anglo-American Feminist Criticism’ and ‘French Feminist Theory’...
eBook - ePub- Rita Felski(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...They distrust all pleasure and passionate engagement. They are deaf to the siren call of beauty and oblivious to the enchanting play of language and form. Their ears are closed, their hearts stony and unyielding. They read books with pinched, disapproving lips, zealously scanning the pages for the slightest hint of sexism. Feminist critics, we are told, are dour, humorless ideologues who reduce complex works to one-dimensional messages and crude expressions of an author’s social biases. They are conspiracy theorists and purveyors of victimology with absurdly antiquated views about all women as doormats and all men as brutes. As a job description, this hardly sounds appealing. If this were really the sum total of feminist criticism, surely a great many scholars would be running in the opposite direction. Yet this does not seem to be happening; feminist approaches to literature are successful, popular, and widely practiced. Perhaps, then, the truth is to be found elsewhere. You would never guess from reading such tirades that many feminist critics nowadays are wary of any general claims about women, femininity, or the female condition. That some of the most respected feminist scholarship takes a hard and critical look at women’s use and abuse of power. That much-anthologized articles talk frankly about the difficulties of squaring aesthetic value with political value. That feminist critics have found much to appreciate in the work of very dead, very white males from Sophocles to Shakespeare and beyond. That there is a large and flourishing body of feminist work on women’s pleasure in literature, popular fiction, and even pornography. 2 Feminist criticism, in other words, is a very broad church, espousing a wide range of theories, approaches, and methods and including all kinds of dissenters and arguers. In fact, there is not much agreement about the best way to explain the links between gender and writing...
eBook - ePubFeminist Art Criticism
An Anthology
- Arlene Raven(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Most art critics and historians, however, fail to discuss the power of images to inform and educate the viewer. A feminist perspective does not replace traditional art historical methodology. Rather, the new complements and amplifies the old, for fresh analyses and interpretations of style and iconography show that art is not value-free and that previous scholarship has not taken this into consideration. Feminist art criticism is significant and necessary because it challenges what feminist literary critic Annette Kolodny calls the “dog-eared myth of intellectual neutrality.” 7 Such neutrality presupposes the neuter status of the mind; as if gender imbalances did not exist in scholarship. For the most part, male-identified minds study art, and as feminist philosopher Mary Daly understands, the sexist products of such intellects affirm what she terms Methodolatry, which is the worship of method, the devotion and faith in “the rite of right re-search.” 8 I turn again to the model of Feminist Literary Criticism, in Kolodny’s article “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” for an argument against Methodolatry. Kolodny offers three pertinent propositions. (I have substituted art terms for literary ones): (1) Art history (and with that the historicity of art) is a fiction; (2) insofar as we are taught to see, what we engage are not objects but paradigms; and, finally, (3) that since the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to objects are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal, we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but as well, the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses. 9 Kolodny is proposing what Adrienne Rich calls re-vision; and feminist art critics re-view and re-vise by looking at well-known works in fresh ways and seeing what art historical “authority” has taken for granted or made invisible...
eBook - ePubThe Dissenting Reader
Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible
- Eryll Wynn Davies(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 3 Feminist Criticism and Reader-response Criticism Feminist biblical scholars have long emphasized the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the Hebrew Bible and, as was suggested in the previous chapter, some of the most exciting and innovative contributions in recent feminist biblical criticism have come from those who have embraced a reader-response approach to the text. During the heyday of the reader-response movement the issue of gender was seldom explicitly addressed, and it took some time for feminist criticism and reader-response criticism to engage with one another in a serious and sustained way. However, once the link between the disciplines was firmly established, the marriage proved to be fruitful and productive. When feminist biblical critics applied this approach to their reading of the Hebrew Bible, it opened up new avenues in biblical research and served to challenge some of the established principles of traditional biblical scholarship. The Rise of Reader-response Criticism In literary theory, the phenomenon known as ‘reader-response criticism’ emerged as a reaction to the views of the so-called ‘New Critics’ who flourished in the 1940s and 1950s. 1 The New Critics (or the ‘formalists’ as they were sometimes called) had emphasized that each literary work was to be regarded as an autonomous, self-sufficient entity, which was to be studied in its own terms, without reference to its cultural and historical context and without regard to the intention of its author or the response of its reader. Meaning was something which inhered exclusively in the text itself, and any extraneous factors were to be discounted, for they would only lead the interpreter astray. The duty of the reader was to come as close as possible to the meaning embedded in the text...
eBook - ePubGender and Discourse
Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations
- Clare Walsh(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...However, while Coward argues that what she terms ‘womanism’ disadvantages men, especially working-class men, I will argue that popularized versions of feminism are just as likely to disadvantage women. This is because the selective appropriation of feminist theories that stress women’s supposed difference from men often helps to rationalize their continuing marginalization and subordination in civil and public sphere roles. Of course, the preferred readings cued by texts, popular or otherwise, are not always accepted by readers and may well be resisted, or even rejected. The type of textual and intertextual negotiations which such resistant readings entail are just as likely to have implications for the identities, relations and beliefs of listeners/readers as more compliant readings. Indeed, one of the central aims of a feminist critical discourse analysis is to promote such resistant and oppositional readings in order to call into question normative gender ideologies. 2.4 Gender and genre Work in feminist stylistics has encouraged readers to recognize that socalled ideal generic conventions are often far from ideal since they tend to be gendered in stereotypical ways (see, for instance, Mills 1995 : 159ff). In their analysis of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, Gill and Whedbee (1997) point to the text’s uncritical acceptance of the generic convention, sanctioned by a long intertextual history, whereby political speeches address a citizenry gendered as male. As this study will demonstrate, other non-literary genres, such as the genres of political debate and religious sermons, are also being subjected to feminist scrutiny, with the result that the conventions that characterize these genres are currently undergoing a process of challenge and change...
