 | Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory Subjects: Humanities; Language & Literature; Cultural Studies; Literature; Feminist Literature & Theory; Literary/ Critical Theory; Gender; Jane Gallop's book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being 'academic'? Gallop takes the novel approach of structuring her inquiry around anthologies of feminist criticism: twelve important texts that have had a wide impact on more than a decade of scholarship. In reading an anthology as a whole, she typically identifies a central, hegemonic voice (usually that of the editor/s) which would organise all the voices into a unity, and then explores the resistance within that volume to such a unity. Weight is placed behind these internal differences as a wedge against the centrist drive. Around 1981 addresses briefly 'french feminism' and psychoanalytic feminism before focusing on its principal subject: the mainstream of feminist literary criticism, before and after its general acceptance as part of the changing institution of literary studies. This brilliantly illuminates the dilemma of the feminist critic, divided by her allegiance to both feminism and literary studies. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Gallop has been associated with the dissemination of "French feminist" poststructuralist theory in the United States. Anglo-American feminists focused on women's experience and history and on "realistic" images of women in literature. French feminists theorists, on the other hand, explored feminine subjectivity and the use of "woman" in language, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Anglo-American feminists searched out literary foremothers; French feminists elaborated a utopian and modernist or avant-garde writing of the feminine body and desire. Anglo-American feminists called for women to make themselves "whole"; French feminists theorized a feminine subject who was inescapably split, gloriously multiple, uncontained by a unitary self. Gallop's second book, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), was published shortly after the first translated works of French feminists appeared. Hers was therefore one of the first American feminist overviews of French feminist deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory. As such, it had a significant impact on the way in which the French theorists were read, and it participated in what was becoming a division within the feminist community between those for or against "theory." All of Gallop's books, even her first, Intersections (1981), strategically engage French theory and questions of sexuality. Typically, Gallop demystifies texts by doing "symptomatic readings" of them, drawing on psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodologies to reveal a work's "perversities"---the contradictions, blind spots, and slips that arise from its rootedness in history and ideological conflicts. She seeks to expose these so as to betray the text's (or author's) interests. Her own work is frequently autobiographical, full of puns and other literary gestures that call into question its claims to knowledge---a process she terms "dephallicization." Gallop has published four books and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including a Guggenheim. (Bowker Author Biography) |
