The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0521001684
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language. This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method. The essays draw on a range of primary material from the medieval period to postmodernism and from several countries, disciplines and genres. Each essay suggests further reading to explore this field further. This is the most accessible guide available both for students of literature new to this developing field, and for students of gender studies and readers interested in the interactions of feminism, literary criticism and literature.
hostility it generated was so fiercely political. No one involved on either side of these early battles would have called them “merely academic” or trivialized them as being of little consequence to the “real world.” The early years of feminist criticism were also a period in which feminists (or women of whatever political disposition) within university literature departments were often an exceedingly small group, frequently seeking alliances in other departments (and helping to found
historically and politically in a postfeminist moment, the dynamics of feminist struggle have changed in the past thirty-odd years. Mohanty addresses these dynamics from the perspective of an antiracist feminism working in a global context where capitalism seems able to override all its former antagonists. She sees the “naturalization of capitalist values” as having a “profound influence in engendering a neoliberal, consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism concerned with ‘women’s advancement’ up
Hopkins University press, 1993), p. 142. 11. Reginia Cagnier, “The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography, and Gender,” in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 266. 12. Reginia Cagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 4. 13. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 91–6. 14.
antihumanist turn to language as what writes us, misrepresents us, imprisons us even, despite our efforts and beliefs to the contrary. In particular, the writings of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan would provide a major influence on French feminists’ methods of inquiry and critique; they who would eventually take the masters’ tools to tear down these structures and reveal their patriarchal bias. To summarize briefly, both Derrida and Lacan challenged the humanistic vision of the world advanced
to cling to our belief in the latest community except to obtain the right to abortion and the pill.”9 From this, it follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “‘that’s not it.’”10 Wittig’s novel Les Gue´rrille`res (1968) 160 French feminism’s e´criture fe´minine represents a moment of this negativity in fictional form when women reject their bodies as a potential source of identity: “They say they must now stop exalting the vulva.