Importing Feminist Criticism
question: our established canons, our aesthetic criteria, our reading habits, and
most of all, ourselves as critics and readers’.7 She then goes on to provide a
summary outline of the scope of feminist criticism at the time, showing how it
was steadily moving from a position that involved ‘exposing the sexual
stereotyping of women’, in both hterature and Eterary criticism to ‘beginning to
record new choices in a new literary history’ (144).
Her oudine does not differ much from Showalters8 by now classical
account of the main areas of feminist work, or of Stimpson’s9 more recent
mapping. By reading them one does get to understand the meaning of the
expression ‘Girls, we have come a long way!’. They all highhght the multiplicity
and the very real achievements of feminist criticism.
Kolodny and Showalter emphasize three main areas of work: 1) the
exposure of the misogyny of literary practice, ranging from the stereotyped
images of women to the exclusions and omissions in a male-constructed canon.
Showalter calls this the properly feminist critique and points out how this kind of
work has actively promoted the return to circulation of previously unknown
works, thus demonstrating women had a lEterature of our own’ and promoting
the estabhshment of a female countercanon. 2) the construction of a female
framework for the analysis of women’s experience, focusing on the examination
of the specificity of women’s creativity as a speciahzed discourse, making visible
a world of female culture, the task of gynocritics. Kolodny adds to this 3) the
study of a particularly feminine language, Pecriture feminine, so central to the work
of French feminist criticism.
Drawing on the central metaphor of mapping, Stimpson calls our
attention to the continuities and expansions from the 70s into the 90s. She points
out the continuation or complementing of gynocritics by the charting of
cultural representations of gender, of patterns of mascuhnity and femininity, the
task Ahce Jardine calls gynesis, and includes the activities of denouncing patterns
of mascuhne dominance and exposing the Unrehabihty of maps that ‘misconstrue
gender issues’. Finally Stimpson points out the overa∏ contributions of feminism
to the necessity of exercising a ‘stimulating vigilance about the processes of map
making themselves’ (251).
7 Kolodny, Annette, ‘Dancing through the Minefield’ in The New Feminist Criticism, Showalter,
Elaine, (ed,), NewYork1 Pantheon Books, 1985, 145.
8 Showalter1 Elaine, ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’ (1979) in The New Feminist Criticism, 125-143.
9 Stimpson1 Catharine1Teminist Criticism’ in Greenblatt1 Stephen and Gunn, Gilles, Redrawing the
Boundaries, NewYork1The Modern Language Association, 1992, 251-270.
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