1. Feminisms and Feminist Literary
Criticism: Definitions
2. Woman: Created or Constructed?
9653001 人社100 鄭朱晏
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.