Feministyczna krytyka literacka

Abstract

The book Feminist literary criticism presents a map of Anglo-American and French women critics under the label of écriture féminine (taking Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, a dissertation published in 1970, as a starting point, and centre the year 1980) constituting an opening for black, lesbian and gay criticism of a man in feminism. In final (What next?) a reflection on the relationship between feminism/feminist literary and queer theory as well as the current status of the institution of women’s studies, gender studies, etc. within the scope of the contemporary humanities and literary sciences. The map does not mean any contact. On the contrary, it is given the movement in time. That is why we observe the attention to the chronology of events which allows for reconstructing a dialogue, polemics concerning the topics activated in given time frames by feminist researchers. Thus, thematic mini centres characterizing the movement of the feminist reflection are outlined. The very mini centres determined by women researchers can also be treated as a guide to the path of basic categories: presentation, signature, subject, experience, reading, the framework of which can be recreated. The scope of Feminist literary criticism can be turned back in time. The book reconstructs and retains important references to works by women before Millett (Spacks, Ellmann, Moers) as well as, according to the critical and interpretative practice, regains the figures of “protofeminists” (Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir). The feminist literary criticism, concentrated on a feminist reading activity, follows its strategies worked out in reading androtexts and ginotexts, also ways of reading suggested by the tradition of poststructuralism and deconstruction (including psychoanalysis) which invalidating gender signature of the author, highlight textuality, écriture, race, class and gender. The question: what are the determiners and parameters of a female and feminist reading? finds different answers spread out in the whole text. Methodological differences, variant projections of the research object, and researcher’s attitudes to feminist ideologies are decisive here. The accents differ in complexity. However, the tendency that dominates in the book is to trace the localization of feminist reading strategies among androcentric methodological suggestions. Thus the contexts which characterized the majority of Anglo- American synthesis of feminist literary criticism are relocated. The starting point is not the “waves” of feminism, but above all, according to the practice of selected researchers, “waves” of methodological suggestions. That is where the concentration on tracing transformations of male theoretical-literary conceptions (Bachelard, Fish, Bloom, Barthes, Derrida), undertaken by researches derives from. The aim of transformations was to adjust androcentric models to the needs of a feminist reading or show their uselessness. The narrative on “events” which constituted feminist literary criticism goes without a selected and homogeneous metalanguage. As a narrator, the author of the book stands not as much outside the reconstructed suggestions (their language) as she tries to speak from their inside. Thus, she uses a lot of citations giving voice to their authors.