Grace Wen
Research and Bibliography
13 Dec. 1999
source
Literature, Gender, Feminist Criticism
      1. Introduction
      2. What's the relationship among literature, gender, and feminist criticism?
        1. What does "gender" mean?
          1. Sex is different from gender.
          2. "Putting literature and gender together allows us to think about how individual texts or genres represent these social process." (117)
        2. What is "feminist criticism"?
          1. Why feminist criticism should be recognizable a term that takes us straight back to the idea of discrimination?
          2. Adopting a political position, feminist criticism aims to combat the discrimination of the literature canonized by man.
          3. Thinking about women's writing, why are there few women's works into the canon?
            1. The aim of conventional criticism is different from the aim of feminist criticism.
            2. Feminists believe that "different therefore equal."
            3. Gender studies operates in a kind of dialogue with the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

            4.  
      3. The main developments in feminist criticism are mentioned.
        1. Marxist feminism shows a number of characteristics of earlier feminist criticism.
        2. Elaine Showalter identifies two kinds of feminist criticism.
          1. Empirical and materialist criticism focuses on historically grounded inquiry.
          2. Psychoanalytic feminist way is based on the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and so on.
        3. Tane Todd divides feminist criticism into two parts: the sociohistorical American and the French psychoanalytical ways.
        4. The favor approach is the psychoanalytical feminism.

        5.  
      4. What's the relationship among men, gender, and queer criticism?
        1. Men criticism let male critics fit easily into women's studies.
        2. The gay studies is instrumental in developing the most distinct critical perspectives on the relationship between literature and the masculine.
        3. Queer criticism is the modern construction of male homosexuality and the role of literary texts in that process.

        4.  
      5. 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.