Feminist critical negotiations

Description

In the modern period the task of literary criticism has been commonly understood to be the determination of the textual body - establishing its parameters and fixing its meaning(s). Similarly, this strategy is demanded by political discourses which often make an unsettling move followed by the substitution of an "improved" politics. Recently, however, these efforts have been the subject of sustained attack by post-structuralist and postmodern writers who perceive the threat inherent in gestures of centrism , consolidation , and reification, as they expose the determinism inherent in "determination." Indeed , these writers show us how textual bodies, the very materiality of language and signification , both require this determinism if we are to "make sense" and simultaneously resist such moves, as they insist on their own often perversely playful and insistent otherness Contents Introduction THEORIZING FEMINIST CRITICISM Feminist Theory as a Practice Bluebeard's Daughters: Pretexts for Pre-Texts Fredric Jameson's Critique of Ethical Criticism Places in the World a Woman Could Walk Plots to a Happy Ending THE FEMINIST WRITING SUBJECT Critical Negotiotions: Calling Feminism Out of Its Name The Golden Notebook A Gaze of One's Own: Narrativizing the Caribbean Ananas/Pineapple The Given and the Created Writing as a trajectory of Desire and Consciousness Contributors