1. Feminisms and Feminist Literary

Criticism: Definitions

2. Woman: Created or Constructed?

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1. Feminisms and Feminist Literary Criticism: Definitions

• Engage with biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, Marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies, as well as ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory, lesbian and gay studies, and gender studies.

• No longer merely the “ism” of white, educated, bourgeois, heterosexual Anglo-American women.

• “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is”

• Feminism has often focused upon what is absent rather than what is present.

• Reflecting concern with the silencing and marginalization of women in a patriarchal culture.

• An overly political approach

• Other approaches for their false assumptions about women

• “Literature is political,” and its politics “is male.”

• In part because of the efforts of feminist critics but also because of social changes such as mass education.

• She is constructed differently by men.

• Feminine Mystique

• demystified the dominant image of happy American suburban housewife and mother.

• New women’s organizations, manifestos, protests, and publications

Sexual politics

• The first widely read work of feminist literary criticism

• The twin poles of gender as biology and culture

• Millett included critiques of capitalism, male power, crude sexuality, and violence against women

• “more uniform, and certainly more enduring

• Collected in large anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women

• Harriett E. Wilson, author of the first novel by an African American woman

• Unearthing women’s literature did not ensure its prominence

• Questioned culture, sexual, intellectual, and/ or psychological stereotypes about women

2. Woman: Created or Constructed?

• Three phases of modern women’s literary development:

• The feminine phase

• The feminist phase

• The female phase

• Four current models of difference:

• Biological

• Linguistic

• Psychoanalytic

• cultural

• Biological model is the most problematic

• Linguistic model asserts that women are speaking men’s language as a foreign tongue

• The Hours relates with unnerving clarity the inner lives of three women connected through their experiences with Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, itself a study of female subjectivity

• Has observes, “English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses opposition; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression

• Being woman-centered or gynocentric, must search for terminology to rescue themselves from becoming a synonym for inferiority.