Guide to Week 11: Thursday
Read Fetterly's book chapter carefully until you are sure you understand what she is saying. Keep in mind that Baym was writing about how Feminist theory can reshape reading of a whole range of literature, what we might call the "canon" of American literature, whereas Fetterly is using interpretations of a specific text to ground a generalization about what Feminist methods can show us about this type of text. When you think you understand Fetterly, click here for a web page containing key concepts and terms of art from Feminist criticism and see if you can explain their meaning and use. Class discussion will begin with a review of these concepts and terms, and if we have time, we can explore additional issues, perhaps including those below. Click here for some tips about how to use the "Concepts and Terms" page and how this "Working With" relates to "Working With Reader-Response," and how your increasing theoretical and critical subtlety affects this assignment.
Fetterly proposes a novel concept, "emasculation," to explain the dislocated feeling which alert women readers will detect when narrators or other authorial devices address them as if they were males. How would Reader-Response theory explain what happens in this moment, and what might a critic like Mailloux say about its significance? Can one be both a R-R and a Feminist critic? Are these theories compatible?
If women readers must adopt the imaginary "phallus" of male perspective to read "masculinist" texts, what might non-aristocratic readers have to adopt in order to read courtly literature from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, works which presumed all readers were members of the court elite? Think about how this relates to Marxist criticism's discourse about varieties of "consciousness." Are there literatures written in Modern English which similarly depend upon class-based assumptions about their readers? Consider the famous two sentence debate between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway: Fitzgerald--"The rich are different from you and me."; Hemingway--"Yes, they have more money." How might that affect readings of The Great Gatsby?
"The personal is the political." Carol Hanisch, Feminist Revolution, March 1969, 204-5.