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For this unit of the semester, it's helpful to recall assumptions of the New
Criticism:
The boundaries between self and other, text and world are
considered firm.
The critic is/should be a neutral observer.
The literary work is regarded as a self-enclosed universe with
its own logic. It stands apart from the world but illuminates the
world.
The literary work should be studied for its distinctively literary
elements, and for how they operate in relation to each other in
the world of the work. The work is valuable for its own sake,
not for any extrinsic purpose.
Basic Tenets of Feminist Criticism
With roots in the 1800s, and coming into its own in the 1970s-90s,
Feminist Criticism (along with several other important types of criticism
and theory) specifically takes issue with New Critical assumptions.
Feminist critics hold that, rather than view the literary work as something
which contains the world or is a world unto itself, we should view the
work as contained by the world. In other words, many felt the New
Critics had gone too far in separating literature from its contexts, its
physical circumstances, the real-world material conditions under which it
is made, read, and studied.
Feminist critics, for example, have re-valued the political, social,
geographical, and historical contexts within which literature exits.
Boundaries between the text and the world, the text and the critic, the
text and the reader are considered fluid, shifting, and porous. Who the
critic, reader, and writer are and where they are located in the world
influences how a work is read and what it means. The critic is interested
in what a text does to the reader, and what the reader projects into the
text. The work is read for its extra-literary values, or for values that, at
the least, are not exclusively literary. This means that the critic's focus
begins to include or even to center on the gender, race, nationality, and
social class of the writer, the critic, the reader, or characters within a
work. The way a work is shaped by its cultural contexts and the way in
which cultural contexts shape the work are key subjects of study.
Additional questions and issues for Feminist critics:
seeks to empower the persons being researched (rather than reduce them to
passive objects of study), and may involve them in the research more
completely;
seeks to promote political change for women;
openly acknowledges researcher biases;
might be more qualitative than quantitative;
blurs the boundary between the personal and the public; between intuition and
reason; between researcher and world.
Sources for the information on this page are available upon request.
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/271/FeministCriticism.htm
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