Grace Wen
Research and Bibliography
13 Dec. 1999
source
Literature, Gender, Feminist Criticism
Introduction
What's the relationship among literature, gender, and feminist criticism?
What does "gender" mean?
Sex is different from gender.
"Putting literature and gender together allows us to think about how individual
texts or genres represent these social process." (117)
What is "feminist criticism"?
Why feminist criticism should be recognizable a term that takes us straight
back to the idea of discrimination?
Adopting a political position, feminist criticism aims to combat the discrimination
of the literature canonized by man.
Thinking about women's writing, why are there few women's works into the
canon?
The aim of conventional criticism is different from the aim of feminist
criticism.
Feminists believe that "different therefore equal."
Gender studies operates in a kind of dialogue with the ideas of Sigmund
Freud.
The main developments in feminist criticism are mentioned.
Marxist feminism shows a number of characteristics of earlier feminist
criticism.
Elaine Showalter identifies two kinds of feminist criticism.
Empirical and materialist criticism focuses on historically grounded inquiry.
Psychoanalytic feminist way is based on the psychodynamics of female creativity,
linguistics and so on.
Tane Todd divides feminist criticism into two parts: the sociohistorical
American and the French psychoanalytical ways.
The favor approach is the psychoanalytical feminism.
What's the relationship among men, gender, and queer criticism?
Men criticism let male critics fit easily into women's studies.
The gay studies is instrumental in developing the most distinct critical
perspectives on the relationship between literature and the masculine.
Queer criticism is the modern construction of male homosexuality and the
role of literary texts in that process.
Conclusion:
Gender-based criticism empowers people to reread texts and bring out new
meaning of literary works.
from
A Handbook to
Literary Research. Eds. Simon Eliot and W.R. Owens. NY: Routledge
in
Association
with Open U, 1998.