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Reviewed by:
  • Literature after Feminism
  • Victoria Rosner (bio)
Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ix + 195 pp. $42.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

An equally apt title for Rita Felski's Literature after Feminism might be In Defense of Feminist Criticism. Felski undertakes two projects in this volume: to anatomize feminist literary criticism for the educated general reader and to take on the enemies of such criticism and expose the flaws in their arguments. Both projects are valuable, though they do not necessarily cohere. The result is a portrait of feminist literary studies as both well-established and imperiled by false allegation; both institutionalized and seen in some circles as illegitimate; strongly consolidated within the academy and under attack from without. These stances are not incompatible; rather, they are views taken from different locations. The narrative of feminist literary criticism that Felski has crafted and that forms the bulk of her book is an accomplished, synthetic, and much-needed contribution to our field, one that can and will immediately be pressed into duty on course syllabi and as an introductory text for a broad audience. My sole concern is that in placing this narrative after her defense of the realm, Felski cedes too much authority and importance to the naysayers.

A blend of polemic and criticism, Felski opens her volume on the battlefield, where she goes on the attack against feminism's critics, and then moves into the study, where she peruses the bookshelves sagging under the weight of the feminist literary criticism of the past thirty years and constructs a well-integrated survey of the major critical debates and trends in the field. In this trajectory, as well as in its evenhanded, accessible tone, Literature after Feminism recalls Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Felski is on guard against the latter-day beadles—old boys, neo-con pundits, Harold Bloom, etc.—who seek to undermine the legitimacy of feminism's place in literature departments.

But do the beadles wield the power they once had? Of course not: Felski assures her readers early on that feminism is thriving in the academy and has had an impact on literary studies that is both broad and deep. Yet her opening lines speak of feminist criticism as endangered by an "avalanche of invective," and characterized as "bitter, hostile, resentful, and, it appears, utterly irrational" (1). Her citation invokes four writers—Bloom (1994), Alvin Kernan (1990), Roger Kimball (1990), and John Ellis (1997)—none of whom take feminist criticism as the exclusive target of their angry laments. Felski engages with Ellis at length, and I almost wish she had an interlocutor more worthy of her considerable analytic and rhetorical talents. She takes Ellis down without breaking a sweat: not too tough a task, when he appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite thinly read in feminist literary studies. Felski is stooping when she has already conquered: consider the true "avalanche" of citations that she offers from the history of feminist criticism in comparison to the few foes she is able to muster to represent the opposition.

Having routed the beadles, Felski turns to her account of feminist ideas about literature. She organizes this vast body of work into four tidy categories: [End Page 124] Readers, Authors, Plots, and Values. "Readers" opens with an appealing juxtaposition of Don Quixote and Emma Bovary, meant to demonstrate how reading is a gendered act. This chapter is especially adept at keeping its narrative about women readers and the reading process uppermost while steeping the text in the relevant criticism. Felski pivots gracefully to present opposing sides of particular debates, giving balanced explication of theories from which she herself dissents, as, for instance, when she describes the limits of Judith Fetterley's influential study of the feminist as resisting reader.

In "Authors," Felski examines the most important allegories of female authorship to emerge over the last twenty years or so, and asks how those allegories shape feminist textual interpretation. She is especially acute on the subject of the evolution of the figure of the madwoman, from the monstrous hidden figure unveiled by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic to...

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