Reading an Other

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Resisting Reader by Judith Fetterley is a groundbreaking critique of the American literary canon that put together two major critical movements of the 1970s—feminist criticism and reception theory. Fetterley demonstrated how canonical American texts are “designed” to “immasculate” women readers, to compel them to identify with a male point of view, one of whose tenets is the designation of woman as other. Fetterley inspired the author to examine how women read women's texts and to formulate a theory of careful, responsible reading that does justice to the communicative project embodied in the text.