Ten Year Checkup: Feminist Criticism and the American Literary Canon

Abstract

The space marked out as feminist criticism of American literature is shared, often polemically, by critics who bring into the field particular analytical tools from linguistics, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology, for example, and from different schools for viewing the world such as modern- ism, structuralism, deconstruction, and reader response. Perhaps no field of current critical thinking is as all encompassing in scope as feminist literary criticism. Not only is there conflict for space between different schools of thought, but the spaces are constantly shifting as feminist perspectives change. On the heels of the backlash against feminism, the terms "feminist criticism" and, hence, "feminist literary criticism" have become both radical- ized and euphemized. As we push into the 1990s, we might ask, what is the state of feminist criticism and, more specifically, what is the state of femin- ist criticism of American literature? Feminist literary criticism has made, and continues to make, progressive and definitive changes in the American literary canon and on procedures for interpreting literature. Furthermore, feminist literary criticism has itself become both a topic for reinterpretation and an integral aspect of the canon and of the literary theoiy generated by the canon. While the body of feminist criticism of American literature has been evolving, some of its practitioners have looked introspectively for clari- fication and definition of the discipline's essence and boundaries. However, critics often explicitly or implicitly draw upon British and French as well as Anglo-American theoretical approaches. The preoccupation with definition and clarification has led to complex dissension, particularly with regard to concepts as disconnected as pluralism and essentialism. That feminist criti- cism combines many conceptual models, is asserted by those captured by what Annette Kolodny (1980) advocated and innocently termed "playful pluralism." Women's writing differs from men's, assert those adhering to the concept of "l'écriture feminine" outlined by Hélène Cixous in 1976. Separating these two germinal approaches, one general and one specific, are many diverse and often dialectically opposed modes which have, in turn, brought us today to the position where feminist criticism is institutionalized and those processes of institutionalization and canonization are themselves integrated into the feminist critic's agenda.