Feminist Criticism at the "English" Track Meet

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The institutional history of never did run smoothly, and we are all aware of the repeated wakes held over the death of literature. Any shift in what we do has been seen as an alarming spectacle of the youngest scholars grabbing a new pole to vault themselves into the profession without all that slow training. What is perhaps new, and most alarming, about feminist criticism is its self-conscious challenge of the rules of the whole track meet (and whether we should have a meet at all). It's as though someone is saying, forget the highest jumper; it is a phallacy to measure jumpsor texts-by the old linear logic of height. And isn't it logocentric blindness to focus on a literary icon as a competitive feat, or on individual authors as athletes? We should examine the entire event as a dynamic contact zone (to adapt Mary Louise Pratt's term in Imperial Eyes 6): how the spectators and contestants are selected; how the literary arena is imbricated with the practices of the academy, society, the globe... I choose a sports metaphor because the disturbance of feminist criticism in the English Department has not been due to female resistance to teamwork and play. One by one and in collaboration, many women have become professors of English and adapted very well to the rules of the game. Few areas of American life have been as accessible to feminists as English departments-I'm setting aside for the moment studies; these interdisciplinary programs have been the culture-in the bacteriological sense-for feminists, and continue to serve a different purpose from (though often relying on) the presence of English professors who teach feminist approaches to literature. Even when feminist professors have become conspicuous in the English Department, urgent questions remain. Some women's movements argue that the focus on gender discrimination has served only a few privileged women in the industrialized West, like adding tennis as an Olympic event. But even tennis players no longer wear white and speak politely. The most threatening tenured feminists, let us imagine, challenge the referees, wave political banners in the midst of what is not supposed to be about politics (what if the Olympics degenerated into battle?), insist that the teams be representative rather than topnotch, ask about the high priced tickets, and generally gossip about decentered subjectivity and the homosociality of uniforms. There's some truth to this disruptive scenario of the Feminist in the English Department, like the Madwoman in the Attic set loose (she has her function in the plot, remember!). But much of the time we have simply added tennis-a female literary tradition-or measured a few more women athletes up to the same old pole vault. We have participated in and influenced a gradual shift from the old canon to the new