Literary Criticism

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Literary Criticism

• Class 8

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• Feminist Criticism

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• The premise that unites all feminist critics is
  the assumption that Western culture is
  fundamentally patriarchal, creating an imbalance
  of power that marginalizes women and their work.
  The feminist critic works to expose such
  ideology and, in the end, to change it so that
  the creativity of women can be fully realized and
  appreciated. (Dobie 97)

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• Feminist literary theorists in particular examine
  how gender coding and gender inequity are
  produced, distributed, perpetuated--AND
  questioned, challenged, and rewritten--in
  literary texts. (http//www.colorado.edu/English/e
  ngl2010mk/2004feminism.html)

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• Key words

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Compiled from http//www.colorado.edu/English/engl
2010mk/2004feminism.html
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(Barry 122)
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Elaine Showalter
(Barry 123 Dobie 99)
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Gynocriticism

• 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 or laws of a female
  literary tradition (qtd. in Barry 123)

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Food for Thought

• 1. Whats Showalters definition of womans
  writing based on? Sex or gender?
• 2. Whats the purpose and value of gynocriticism?

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• Feminist Theory

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(Barry 124-26 Dobie 100)
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• Feminism Language

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lécriture feminine

• (1) it is at the level of sexual pleasure
  jouissance in my opinion, that the difference
  makes itself most clearly apparent in as far as
  womans libidinal economy is neither identifiable
  by a man nor referable to the masculine economy
  (Cixous, Sortie, 291).

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• (2) Though masculine sexuality gravitates around
  the penis, engendering that centralized body (in
  political anatomy) under the dictatorship of its
  parts, woman does not bring about the same
  regionalization . . . . Her libido is cosmic,
  just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing
  can only keep going, without ever inscribing or
  discerning contours, daring to make these
  vertiginous crossings of the other(s) ephemeral
  and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom
  she inhabits long enough to look at from the
  point closest to their unconscious from the
  moment they awaken, to love them at the point
  closest to their drives and then further,
  impregnated through and through with these brief,
  indentificatory embraces, she goes and passes
  into infinity. (Cixous, Norton 2052)

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• (3) She alone dares and wishes to know from
  within, where she, the outcast, has never creased
  to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets
  the other language speakthe language of 1,000
  tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death.
  To life she refuses nothing. Her language does
  not contain, it carries it does not hold back,
  it makes possible . . . I am spacious, singing
  flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I,
  more or less human, but alive because of
  transformation (Cixous, Norton 2052)

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Kristeva
(Barry 129)
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Food for Thought

• 1. Do you agree that women use language in ways
  that are different from those of men? Why or why
  not?
• 2. Do women have a different pattern of
  reasoning?
• 3. Do women see the world in a different way?
• (Dobie 101)

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• Feminism Psychoanalysis

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Social Castration

• Phallus emblem of social power
• Phallucentrism Logocentrism center of Western
  civilization
• Social Castration signifies womens lack of
  social power

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• Feminism Reading

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• In order to disclose the arbitrariness of
  patriarchal hegemony, feminist critics engage in
  a dialogical opposition to traditional models and
  values (Furman 71).

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• Infidelity . . . is a feminist practice of
  undermining the Name-of-the-Father. The
  unfaithful reading strays from the author, the
  authorized, produces that which does not hold as
  a reproduction, as a representation
• (Gallop 1982 quoted in Furman 71)

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• Feminism Deconstruction

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• Thinking in terms of binary opposition always
  implies the subordination of the second element
  to the first, and reversing the older of the
  pairing only repeats the system which was at work
  in the initial opposition. (Furman 75).

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• From a Derridian position, the feminist endeavor
  cannot be conceived in terms of male or female,
  feminine or masculine it can only be thought of
  beyond such polarities as a kind of sexual
  plurality (Furman 75).

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• Feminist Literary Criticism
• in Praxis

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• The Controversy of Women in D. H. Lawrences
  Novels

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• (1) When Anna and Will are married in The
  Rainbow, Tom Brangwen, Annas stepfather, wanted
  to make a speech.
• For the first time in his life, he must spread
  himself wordily.
• Marriage, he began, his eyes twinkling and yet
  quite profound, for he was deeply serious and
  hugely amused at the same time, Marriage, he
  said, speaking in the slow, full-mouthed way of
  the Brangwens, is what were made for.
• Let him talk, said Alfred Brangwen, slowly and
  inscrutably, let him talk. Mrs. Alfred darted
  indignant eyes at her husband.
• A man, continued Tom Brangwen, enjoys being a
  man for what purpose was he made a man, if not
  to enjoy it?

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• Thats a true word, said Frank, floridly.
• And likewise, continued Tom Brangwen, a woman
  enjoys being a women at least we surmise she
  does.
• Oh, dont you bother, called a farmers wife.
• You may back your life theyd be summising,
  said Franks wife.
• Now, continued Tom Brangwen, for a man to be a
  man, it takes a woman.
• It does that, said a woman grimly.
• And for a woman to be a woman, it takes a man,
  continued Tom Brangwen.
• All speak up, men, chimed in a feminine voice.
• Therefore we have marriage, continued Tom
  Brangwen.
  (qtd. in Beynon 117)

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• (2) Birkin tells Ursula And woman is the same
  as horses two wills act in opposition inside
  her. With one will, she wants to subject herself
  utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and
  pitch her rider to perdition. Birkin is
  convinced that subjection is the last, perhaps
  highest, love-impulse resign your will to the
  higher being. (from The Rainbow, qtd. in Beynon
  126)

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• (3-1) D. H. Lawrences programme for womanhood
• Let her learn the domestic arts in their
  perfection. Let us even artificially set her to
  spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to
  prevent her reading and becoming self-conscious.

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• (3-2) Make her yield to her own real unconscious
  self, and absolutely stamp on the self shes got
  in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into
  her own true unconsciousness.

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• (3-3) When once she . . . knows that the
  loneliness of waiting and following is
  inevitable, that it must be so ah, then how
  wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back
  to her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and
  waits! How good it is when the night falls! How
  richly the evening passes!
• (from Fantasia of the Unconscious, qtd. in Beynon
  126)

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Chinese/Taiwanese Texts

• Group Activity
• Identify feminist issues

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References

• Beynon, Richard, ed. D. H. Lawrence The Rainbow
  and Women in Love. Cambridge Icon Books, 1997.
• Cixous, Hélène. The Laugh of the Medusa. Ed.
  Vincent B Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory
  and Criticism. 2001. 2035-56.
• Cixous, Hélène. Sorties. Modern Criticism and
  Theory. Ed. David Lodge. London Longman, 1988.
  286-93.
• Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice.
  Thomson/Heinle, 2002.
• Furman, Nelly. The Politics of Language Beyond
  the Gender Principle? Making A Difference
  Feminist Literary Criticism. Eds. Gayle Greene
  and Coppélia Kahn. London Routledge, 1985.