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Feminist Literary Criticism as Irony Sally L. Kitch Wichita State University Although the title of this essay links feminist literary criticism with irony, I do not mean thereby to demean the significance of that criticism. Feminist literary criticism is serious criticism whose existence is not ironic. I do, however, think that feminist criticism can be seen as casting an ironic light upon other forms of criticism and even upon literary history. Therefore, it is the purpose of this paper to explore the contributions of feminist literary criticism through the trope of irony. The Terms of Analysis No longer a new scholarly enterprise, feminist literary criticism has become by now a vast and varied field. One helpful organizing principle for the perspectives encompassed by that field can be found in the work of Elaine Showalter, who identifies two major categories of feminist criticism. The first category includes criticism which interprets literary works from a feminist perspective. This mode is somewhat ideological in nature; it is concerned with the feminist as reader. According to Showalter, such criticism offers "readings of texts which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and woman-as-sign in semiotic systems." That is, this feminist critique, as Showalter calls it, concentrates on identifying the uses and misuses of women writers by critics and of women characters by writers. Misuses would include the stereotyping of women in literature and the discounting or trivializing of works by women authors. Naturally, such feminist criticism often focuses on literature by men or on critical analyses which have been undertaken without the benefit of women's studies scholarship (12). The second category of criticism Showalter defines is gynocriticism. This woman-centered criticism is concerned with the essential difference between the work of women who write from within their gender identities and that of writers (male or female) who follow the forms of traditional, maledominated literature. This category asks the question: If a woman writes from her gendered perspective, either within or without the conventions and exigencies of literary tradition, what characterizes her work? Showalter includes in this category of criticism all theories of difference — biological, linguisitic, psychoanalytical, and, her own favorite, cultural. Her cultural understanding of gender difference in women's writing considers the effects of all factors — linguistic, biological, and psychological structures — on gender within specific social contexts (14-15, 27). Though not ironic in themselves, feminist critique criticism and gynocriticism reveal ironies within, and stand in ironic juxtaposition to, 8 Rocky Mountain Review the literature and criticism they address. In evoking the trope of irony, I mean to suggest both its literary and its colloquial usage. In common parlance, something is ironic if it contains unexpected or contradictory meanings or results. As a literary term, irony implies the author's presentation of a subject (or person) through the negation on the figurative level of what is affirmed on the literal level, or vice versa (White 34). Feminist literary criticism implies both forms of irony because it offers an insight which alters our understanding — in unexpected, surprising, and even contradictory ways — of both the literal and figurative levels of literature by introducing gender considerations into the creative and critical processes. A survey of the treatment of literary irony in the work of many critics reveals another pair of related categories, which I shall call delusional and contrapuntal irony. The subtle distinctions between these two forms of irony further help to illustrate the role of feminist literary criticism in both literary and critical history. The first type, delusional irony, is the irony of hidden or deceptive meaning, wherein falsehood "wears the mask of truth" (Vico 301). I. A. Richards describes this kind of irony as productive of meaning which is "the exact contrary to that overtly expressed" (855). Wayne Booth calls this form stable irony — that which is intentionally covert and is meant "to be reconstructed with meanings different from those on the surface" (5-6). This category suggests a kind of delusional irony because it requires the reader to negate the evident meaning in order to discover the true (or truer) meaning of the work. A reader who does not comprehend...

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