A WHOLE NEW POETICS BEGINNING HERE: THEORIES OF FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

While feminist critics were not the first to recognize the ideological import of art, they were the first to identify gender as an ideological category of experience. The radically revisionary potential of this insight has not yet been fully understood, for feminist theory questions as contingent what all previous literary theory has simply assumed to be immutable. Because assumptions about women and about gender are so much a part of our literary inheritance, a criticism that has learned to see these assumptions can transform literary theory.;Feminism is a political philosophy before it is a literary theory. Rather than attempting to develop a critical "correct line," feminists should recognize the power of our diversity. Where traditional criticisms have tended to ignore their mutual dependence, feminist criticism--with its emphasis on interdependence in place of hierarchy, on connections rather than rules--is uniquely equipped to offer a synthesis of many theories. In a sense, feminist criticism can be contrasted not with affective stylistics or Russian Formalism, but with "androcentric criticism.".;Feminist criticism challenges all previous models of aesthetic value, for in the radical disjunction of art and politics lies the creation of sexual meaning. Nevertheless, the attempt to outline evaluative criteria will never be a feminist priority. Feminist re-vision, like the formalist defamiliarization or "making strange," is primarily a process of dis/orientation. The traditional critical question--Is what we see "good"?--is less important than the feminist reinterpretation of it: What is it that we see?;Whether feminist critics choose a "gynocentric" study of women's literary history or a revisionary investigation of the symbolic uses of gender, they come up against the question of difference: how is women's writing different from men's? The puzzle of sexual asymmetry, however, is only partly a question of difference; it is as much a question of evaluation and perception. We read women as women not because they are "different," but because it is as women that they have been excluded from literary history. Effective feminist theory is more than what is looked at; it is a way of looking.