Key Theorists and Concepts in Feminist Literary Criticism

Foundational Concepts in Feminist Literary Theory

23. Gayatri Spivak and Situational Anti-sexism

According to Gayatri Spivak, any feminist subject engaging in situational anti-sexism must devise strategies for representing:

• Women
• Identity
• Desire
• Interest
• Politics

24. & 25. Nancy Armstrong's Contribution to Novel Studies

Key Ideas by Nancy Armstrong:

• She wrote “What Feminism Did to Novel Studies.”
• She posits that “novels produce forms of femininity and masculinity for both women and men who read them.”

26. Blas Sánchez Dueñas: Essential Requirements for Feminist Criticism

According to Blas Sánchez Dueñas, the following are the “musts” in Feminist Criticism:

• Canons must be revised.
• Women must be included in canons.
• Texts must be revisited.
• Differences that originate discrimination must be spotted in order to subvert them.

27. Gerda Lerner's Three Stages of Feminist Literary Criticism History

1. To focus upon women writers of the past.
2. To focus on women's experiences: letters, diaries, and autobiographies.
3. To focus on revisions and subversion of literary texts (genre, voice, plots).

28. Cheri Register: Five Purposes of Feminist Literary Criticism

• To revisit the history of literature in order to point out patriarchal assumptions and to show the way women are represented in texts according to social, cultural, and ideological principles.
• To make women writers visible.
• To offer reading tools to women accustomed to reading male writers.
• To foster a feminist reading, thus creating a new reading and writing community.
• To highlight that women writers tend to share stories, topics, and genres.

29. Key Figures Against Heterosexism in Feminist Criticism

Bonnie Zimmerman, Teresa de Lauretis, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde represent the tendency against heterosexism within feminist literary criticism.

30. Third World Feminist Literary Criticism: Representatives and Ideas

Representatives:

• Gayatri Spivak
• Chandra Mohanty
• Gloria Anzaldúa

Main Focus Areas:

They focus on matters relating to Hybridity, Ethnocentricity, Symbolic Nature, Imperialism, and Social and Ethnic Discrimination.

31. Virginia Woolf: Modernist Writer and Critic

• Woolf’s political involvement (e.g., women’s suffrage, the Women’s Cooperative Guild, or the Labour Party) assumes continuity between the woman and the author.
• She shared George Eliot’s interest in past literature, but for Woolf and other women writers, this relationship was complicated by the values inscribed in the canon.
• In Woolf’s fiction, references to the continuing presence of prehistory are evident.
• She suggests that civilization rests on fragile foundations.
• Woolf often juxtaposes the Victorian worldview—particularly late Victorian patriarchy and the imperialist worldview—with a feminist, liberal, or socialist consciousness.