As I read Kolodny I realized that she was answering the question I raised when I wrote on Virginia Woolf: is her essay "A Room of One's Own" worth studying over and over when most women (and men) are aware of the male gender's suppression of females? Kolodny's answer is that "feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely 'exposing sexism in one work of literature after another,' and promised, instead, that we might at last 'begin to record new choices in a new literary history'" (2147). And Kolodny's essay is exactly that--less of an exposure of how awful the female condition has been and more of a call for men and women to change the way they view literature.
This essay is a form of criticism with which I can deal. I like that Kolodny doesn't approach feminism strictly as a binary opposition to male dominance. Rather, she places responsibility on men and women to interpret women's writings in a whole new way. For feminism, which aims to place so much emphasis on equality but is typically understood to be a bashing of all things male, I believe that this essay finally reaches the equilibrium of what feminism is--both sexes trying to read women's writing with the understanding that it stands separate from male writing, yet holds the same weight as far as aesthetics and canonical standings are concerned.
This essay is a form of criticism with which I can deal. I like that Kolodny doesn't approach feminism strictly as a binary opposition to male dominance. Rather, she places responsibility on men and women to interpret women's writings in a whole new way. For feminism, which aims to place so much emphasis on equality but is typically understood to be a bashing of all things male, I believe that this essay finally reaches the equilibrium of what feminism is--both sexes trying to read women's writing with the understanding that it stands separate from male writing, yet holds the same weight as far as aesthetics and canonical standings are concerned.
2 comments:
Hey I like your piece about Kolodny. I haven't read that article yet, but I'm on my way and I am encouraged to hear that she draws upon that happy medium of both sexes working together. If they did not do so there would be a split between critics and ultimately is taken to the extreme...the beginnig of separate English studies.
An issue brought up in class today was the fact that men who read poetry and hav ea passion for hte arts are considered 'feminine". How do the males deal with that? This is another serious issue in the study of literature.
Hi Jorilee, I tried to post a comment but it's not posting. In any case, nice thinking about Kolodny. It's more of a stereotype than a reality that feminism involves male bashing, so Kolodny may not be so unusual as you think.
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