Showalter , Feminist readings

In Showalter’s essay, a feminist literary critic reads and identifies the difference between masculine and feminine literature as a way of interpreting the significance of its comprehension; “Woman as reader – woman the consumer of male produced literature and with the way the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes”. (pg 146)

A feminist literary critic should analyze women’s literature based on their experiences; “Analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories”. (pg 149)

A feminist literary critic should master masculine literary history and develop a revolutionary and contrasting tradition in feminine literary culture; “Avoid linear male literary history; Stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.” (pg 149)

A feminist critic should put effort into intellectual achievement as much as men and develop their own independent form of literature: “Since 1920, women reject both imitation and protest two forms of dependency and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature.”(pg 154)

In “Chinua Achebe’s” feminist criticism, Jonathan Culler comes up with feminist criticism and issues where to read as a woman is to avoid reading as a man. A feminist critic should “identify the specific defenses and distortions of male readings and provide correctives”.

Culler argues that feminine critics should put much interest into their works from their own experiences; “Woman’s experience , many feminist critics claims, will lead them to value works differently from their male counterparts, who may regard the problems woman characteristically encounter as of limited interest.”