Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism

Abstract

Most critics today would see the of as beginning and ending not with freedom but with power. For them, the central task of a conference on the politics of interpretation would be to see how various forms of power, open or covert, enforce various kinds of interpretation or perhaps how a given interpretation serves a given established power. In that view, the search for freedom of interpretation becomes the problem of how to resist power-how to wrest it from those who have it or how to produce a text that will not be co-opted by it. Who has the power-which class, which ruler, which faction, which sex-to impose what can be said and not said? Whose language, because of the power of its users, imposes a given view of reality upon whoever fails to resist that language? It is always easy to find examples showing that to control a language is to control everyone who uses that language; critics have found that analysis of power turns up astonishing and sometimes even persuasive transformations of our traditional views, both of our cultural history and of our picture of how we work together in discourse.' I am not interested in arguing that it is a mistake to travel this route. Power is one good starting point in thinking about any human problem. But of course