Week 2--Reading, Interpreting, Criticising, Theorizing

I have had little contact with the feminist movement.  In the 60's, at least, feminists seemed to be trying to make themselves into copies of men (as Virginia Woolf anticipates that they would).  I cannot remember EVER thinking or feeling that men were the equals, much less the superiors, of women, except in physical strength.  I find it hard to understand why I have encountered in my life so little of the prejudice against women which clearly exists.  But any strongly held belief has a way of transforming the immediate environment and attracting confirmation of itself.  Certainly my belief in the superiority of women has been confirmed every day of my life.

     I give that bit of background to explain why "emasculating" does not resonate with me.  I can appreciate other women's experience of emasculation because they describe it.  Yes, we learn to think like men, but they can't make us WRITE like men.  Do you need to read more than one page to know absolutely that the author is male or female?  "Men value autonomy" and "women value relationship".  Reading non-fiction for me is like a conversation.  Of course, the male author is conversing with other men, so he is much more protective of his autonomy than he would be in a real conversation with me.  I don't much like to be spoken  to like a man (inferior creatures!) so I find myself on guard against my own prejudices.  The more beautifully the man writes, the harder it is to avoid slipping into that prejudice and to give him a just hearing.   Women's non-fiction writing, strangely enough, seems to be addressed also to men.  I have the feeling she's talking to someone standing behind me.  That happens in real life often enough that it causes no problem.  She "values relationship" anyway.

     Fiction seems to me quite different.  The male authors I read address a mixed audience and I can easily let myself go and live in the world they create.  Some women authors of fiction address a mixed audience and some few address women.  Rereading those works addressed to women is like sitting with an old and trusted friend - pure joy.

     I see I left out fiction by men addressed to men (e.g. Laurence, Joyce).  Their unconscious psyches laid out for all to see is not an attractive sight.  I always feel I've taken a dip in a cesspool!  I no longer read those authors.

     Sosnoski gave me a new reading experience:  non-fiction addressed to a mixed audience.  In spite of the pedantic style, which I had to read around, it was totally enjoyable.  He convinced me by his logic, his intuition, and his practice. 

First, some miscellaneous thoughts:

A very basic assumption for Sosnoski is that people and characteristics of people can be spoken of as essentially ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’; furthermore, ‘feminine’ is good and ‘masculine’ is bad, and not in a merely metaphorical way. Is it useful to talk label a certain type of literary theory ‘feminine’ and another ‘masculine’?

It’s interesting that Sosnoski uses the concept of the Magister Implicatus: it’s a male personification, as opposed to the more usual female ones i.e. Liberty, Justice, Mary-Anne, etc.

His device in the opening section of repeating the phrase, “this is an essay about …” but with a different ending each time … I like that. Why shouldn’t a scholar be very clear about zir’s agenda?

Is a 19^th century gentleman preferable to a 20^th century businessman? Sosnoski seems to suggest this. “Back in the good old days …” Though I’d rather find my calling than pursue a career.

From footnote 13: “Far more important than the deconstruction of literary texts is the politicization of literary study, a project in which feminists have led the way.” Could a woman say that? Would a woman take so much credit?

Now, some thoughts that all hang together:

He writes in the format he criticizes, with footnotes and everything! On the surface, I see no difference.

-footnotes are a sign of the evil of masculinity and patriarchy, because they embody verification and falsification (pg 59)

-In the epilogue of Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln said “If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes.” He considers footnotes to be the least ideological and the least narrative (what is this close link between ideology and narrative?) portion of scholarly texts.

“Ideally, footnotes mark the fact that a scholarly text is not a discourse of free invention, wherein ideological interests escape all controls. Rather, they serve as a visible reminder that scholarly texts result from a dialectic encounter between an interested inquirer, a body of evidence, and a community of other competent and interested researchers, past, present, and future. All who participate are committed to a sustained engagement with the data and also with one another, their engagements being mediated by shared principles of theory and method, which – like the evidence and its interpretation – are subject to renegotiation in the space of their texts and conversations. Scholarship implies and depends on debate wherein one experiences the scrutiny and criticism of others who are able to point to data and invoke established principles of method. In so doing, they act as a check on ideological manipulation. This check is important, even though it is never entirely effective, since critics also have their ideological interest and themselves must be subject to scrutiny and critique.”

Lincoln seems to fall between Sosnoski and the Magister Implicatus: Lincoln advocates for objectivity, but no one person is capable of it; indeed, the community is not capable of it. Nevertheless, we must try. The very footnotes which Sosnoski objects to (or is just how they’re used that he objects to) are central to the attempt. Is Lincoln describing a kind of communal story-telling? Can scholarship be practiced that way? Is it practiced like that already, when not at it’s worst?

-How does Sosnoski use footnotes? Is he consciously, pointedly not using them for either verification and falsification?

Some other thoughts, on then nature of story-telling and the pleasure of having no hierarchy for the tellings:

“We know that Hamlet was no woman in disguise” (pg 61); immediately, I want to write a version of Hamlet in which he is a woman in disguise, it’s a challenge! Perhaps he’s transgender? Though describing a transgender person as a man or woman in disguise is problematic, excitingly so. Perhaps there was a reason to hide his true sex? Why? Who knows? How vast is the conspiracy, or is it an open secret? And is there anything in the play which can be used toward the end of explaining how Hamlet might be a woman?

This reaction is the result of my long exposure to fandom, which is what happens when fans of a particular book, tv show, movie, etc. wonder ‘what if?’ and then write it; or they wonder what so-and-so was thinking when that happened, or what the background is for an underdeveloped or minor character, or what kind of sexual relationship those two characters would have, or what will happen next, and they write it. As my friend Dana put it:

I've never watched it, but I believe the format of Iron Chef is the same as that chef competition I read a book about: you just turn up for the competition, and they give you a couple of sheet pans with, f'rex, a duck, some hanger steaks, figs, broccoli rabe, sand dabs, raspberry jam, fava beans, and banana liqueur. And everybody else gets the same stuff, and you know the judges are going to be pretty bored if you cook exactly what they expect. They may feel better about it if your technique is impeccable, but...

And that's how I think of canon. Everybody gets the same ingredients, although there will be various opinions about whether the show jumped the sand dabs (or at what point). But I'm always more interested in whether a story is interesting and fresh than its degree of canon compliance because, if I wanted something really canonical I'd read/watch canon.

PS--if lyrstzha decided to make, like, duck *ice cream* I bet it would be great.

I have vastly enjoyed several tellings of the same story, as a result. My liking has depended far more on the skill of the writer than on the premise. Indeed, one of my very favorite things about fandom is how unexpected it can be; a talented writer can make anything into a good story, and more likely than not it won’t have to be a satire or parody to be good. It might have to be AU, but it can still be, in a way, in this telling, true to the characters, and true, just as true as canon. In The Telling, a novel by Ursula K. le Guin:

[Story-telling is a central part of the old culture/religion/practices of Aka] But these stories weren’t gospel. They weren’t Truth. They were essays at truth. Glances, glimpses of sacredness. One was not asked to believe, only to listen.

“Well, that’s how I learned the story,” they would say, having told a parable or recounted a historical episode or recited an ancient and familiar legend. “Well, that’s the way this telling goes.”

The holy people in their stories achieved holiness, if that was what it was, by all kinds of different means, none of which seemed particularly holy to Sutty. There were no rules, such as poverty chastity obedience … There were no rules. There was always an alternative. The story-tellers, when they commented on the legends and histories they told, might point out that that had been a good way or a right way of doing something, but they never talked about the right way. And good was an adjective always …

All that said, the fen are perfectly capable of becoming deeply invested in one particular telling, to the point of vicious argument; they don’t all delight in variety. Still, fandom provides an opportunity to share and enjoy multiple tellings.

The location and mode of legitimate, valid Truth has changed. Is Sosnoski aware that mythos was once where truth was kept? In Homeric times and before, mythos meant truthful speech, logos meant false. This changed as a result of the invention of writing. (According to one scholarly story, one which I find beguiling.) Mythos was associated with young men, women, tricky and untrustworthy characters; logos with masculine warlike honest men. This seems similar to Sosnoski’s observation that in traditional criticism, arguments are characterized as intellectual masculinity, quarrels as female (pg 71). He also equates personified Logos with a frightening punishing father (pg 58). Truth was gendered for the ancient Greeks, and it is gendered for Sosnoski. Truth and knowledge are markers of power, of status. For most of history, truth has one way or another been more in the domain (if that’s the right way to put it) of men: if it’s an old wives’ tale, it doesn’t contain much truth; women were denied access to education so that they couldn’t break into scholarly story-telling.

And therefore …

Schweickart's notion of feminist reading is extremely problematic, especially when current theories surrounding gender are taken into account. She insists that "The feminist story will have at least two chapters: one concerned with feminist readings of male texts, and another with feminist readings of female texts....The story will speak of the difference between men and women, of the way the experience and perspective of women have been systematically and fallaciously assimilated into the generic masculine, and of the need to correct this error." (39) In other words, Schweickart insists on a reading which declares that men and women are, in fact, different. Instead of trying to eliminate the idea of inherent differences between men and women in order to put them on an equal footing, Schweickart would instead like to create an entire seperate field for women reading the literature of either women. In this way, her theory proposes something not much different from Woolf's isolationist theory in Three Guineas.

Schweickart's use of example is also very telling. While she draws upon multiple examples of a feminist reading of a male text, she chooses to use only Adrienne Rich's "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" to examine a feminist reading. Schweickart seems to believe that this tells a "different" story from a criticism of a male author because Dickinson and Rich are both female. She admits that "Rich's interpretation of Dickinson...is frankly acknowledged as conditioned by her own experience as a twentieth-century feminist poet" (56). This reading is characterised as feminist because it attempts to establish a "connection" between the author and the critic. However, this seems to me to be just as likely between any author and critic of any gender where as little information is known as there is about Emily Dickinson. In fact, "Vesuvius at Home" is as much an essay about Rich as it is about Dickinson, in that the way Rich interprets Dickinson's work is so heavily influenced by her own experiences, especially as a lesbian, a point which Schweickart strangely overlooks. Is this what feminist criticism should be? Trying to find oneself in the work of another? Does Schweickart then believe the critique of male authors is different from female authors because it is theoretically easier for the critic to relate to someone of the same gender?

Finally, Schweickart does not allow for the possibility of a male feminist. This is extremely evident in the last paragraph, when she is speaking of "the hope that ultimately this community will expand to include everyone" and yet continues on to say that "we should strive to redeem the claim that it is possible for a woman, reading as a woman, to read literature written by women." (56) Obviously, Schweickart's definition of everyone does not include men. However, this definition is as dangerous to the goals of feminism as a move for equality as the patriarchal definition of everyone which often excludes women. While I believe that a feminist reading is both possible and highly desirable in understanding the formations of gender roles and the part they play in societies, I believe that Schweickart's "Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading" may have been going in the wrong direction.

Schweickart's article had wonderful gems of truth hidden in the academic blah blah blah. There were moments of great clarity and truths that spoke to me as a feminist reader of male and female texts. The major issue I had was her total concession to gender stereotypes. She buys into this image of all women seeking to connect and form relationships. She says by reading anything in a community of women where all voices are heard is in and of itself a feminist reading. I think that this is a touchy-feely sentiment that doesn't fit with her wonderful scholarly approach to women as writers and readers. Call me a traditionalist, but for me a feminist reading/interpretation is talking about what you see as a resiting reader, discussion of women's roles in the work itself, and application of feminist and feminist literary theory to the literature.

I found Schweikart's essay very useful in developing my own thoughts on both reader response theory and feminist criticism. Therefore, I was a little disappointed that we didn't spend as much time on the text in class. There is so much in it! Even though I didn't agree with a lot of it, I still found her arguments interesting and thought-provoking.

The aspect of the essay I most wanted to highlight and discuss was what she lists as the second story of reading: Malcolm X learning to love to read in prison. I found this story extremely compelling. She quotes him as saying that "the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive." I love this disctinction he makes here between being alive and being mentally alive.

However, I was frustrated by the direction the rest of her essay took. After bringing in his story, she appears to dismiss it with a comment about Malcolm X's interpretation of Mendelian genetics, saying "whether you start with a black man or a white man, without a woman, you get nothing."

In fact, I found the story of Woolf's invented heroine, Mary, to greatly parallel his story. Schweickert does too, saying that both are subject to "the pervasive systemic injustices of our time." But how/why can/does she admit this similarity and then not include aspects of race in her ideal description of feminist criticism? Is this another example of a theorist who thinks that gender trumps race? Or thinks they must be analyzed differently? Or don't apply to each other? How? This is so short sighted. They affect each other! I don't think I know the answers to these questions, but I want to think about them.

I am so deelpy troubled by both her and Woolf's insistence on the strict dualist model of gender. Rigidly assigning all women and all men certain modes of communication is certainly, I hope, a dated rhetorical approach.

Flora

I have to say that there were very few points in Sosnoski's essay that I could find any reason to disagree with. What I was hung up most on was the vocabulary. He describes the "Magister Implicatus" as impeccably male but there are definitely women who work in a competitive manner that mirrors exactly what Sosnoski described. So I'm not sure why the "Magister Implicatus" must be male. I understand that it comes from a history of opression and only recently have women become more respected in the field of literary criticism, but it is more of a mindset issue than a gender issue. I don't believe it is accurate to use the word "male" in describing the "male machine. In a quote from Sosnoski's essay by Marc Feigen Fasteau, he states, " The male machine is a special kind of being, different from women, children, and men who don't measure up," which shows that even men do not fit into the prototype of the "male machine." Yet there are women who fit the description of a "male machine" perfectly. Realizing that Sosnoski's essay was written in the late 1980s, I'm hoping that current critics of literary criticism have found new un-gendered terms.

However, I love Sosnoski's argument that competition is not even close to the best method of achieving verification. For competition to work there needs to be a right and wrong and as Sosnoski points out, "texts do not provide a factual ground to interpretive claims, that writers and readers are discursive subjects who cannot be codified... In short, in post-modern theorizing, the very possibility of falsification is thoroughly undermined as a worthwhile intellectual endeavor," (69). There is a clear trend in essays written by professionals where the entire point of the essay is to falsify someone else's prior claim. Simply tearing down someone else's argument, more often than not, is a waste of time. However, if both essay-writers were to collaborate, both minds would reach a conclusion more worthy of scholarly work and intellectual capacity would increase rather than shift from one thought to the next.

Overall, Sosnoski's essay doesn't need to be at all about gender, but it is the past work of men that have created a trend and thus competition/falsification is labeled "male." It almost seems that the entire essay could have been written without any mention of gender with words that have the same meaning of insider vs. outsider. I hope his alternative methods to competition have been put into use in the field of literary criticism (or in all fields of study), because they are by far the best methods of aiding intellectuality.

My initial reaction to Sonoski is that I don't quite identifiy with his theories of the relationsip between a reader and the text as much as I identified with Scweickart's theories. His theory about the "mindless man-driven machine" certainly approached what feminist literary theory is from a much different perspective than Schweickart did- he explicitly examines literary theory from the underlying and already-existant structure in place that reinforces the patriarchical nature of the field of literary theory.

He also observes and grounds much of his argument in the realities of the work, the competitive nature, the desire instilled early on by professors and bosses to suceed in a "vertical" manner (i.e. climbing the ladder to success), to win awards and recognition, etc. It is this desire to suceed that leads to what Sonoski terms "falsificity" (pg. 41) in the field of literary criticism. Critics feel they cannot admit error because to admit error is to admit to being wrong, and therefore they must always insist upon their own argument as always being the correct one. Sonoski points out the seemingly obvious problem with this tendency on the part of the literary critics to never admit thier own errors or even recognize the flaws in thier arguments. Knowledge must and should be gained, according to Sonoski, through communal effort. Much as Schweickart called for a community of feminist readers and writers, Sonoski is calling for a community of differences composed of literary theorists and critics. Sonoski, however, sees the differences as precisely the best part about the communal effort whereas Schweickart seemed more intent on the "togetherness" aspect of community.

As different as the two arguments are, I don't think they're entirely in opposition. However, I think it's easier to identify with Schweickart's essay much more because she is writing so explicitly from the perspective of a woman, which I obviously can relate to as I self-identify as a female, and also her argument is stronger because she acknowledges the dominating patriarchy of the literature field while at the same time actively resisting it thoruhgout, whereas Sonoski focuses his entire essay around the problems within the patriarchy. I suppose a simple characterization of Sonoski's essay would be that it's from the "insider" perspective, written from within the very patriarchy it considers flaws, while Schweickart writes from the "outsider" perspective, consciously focusing on the meaning of a feminist literary community (which would of course have to operate outside the patriarchy).