ABSTRACT
It’s better to be a woman in our day. With us is all the joy of advance, the glory of conquering… Thank heaven we are women!
—from George Gissing, The Odd Women (1983)
A number of prominent English and American male theorists have recently begun to recognize the intellectual claims of feminist criticism, and to connect it with their own critical positions. Wayne Booth led the way by linking feminism and interpretation at the conference on “The Politics of Interpretation” at Chicago, when he declared his conversion to a feminist criticism that had finally persuaded him that “our various canons have been established by men, reading books
mostly written by men for men, with women as eavesdroppers,” and that “now is the time for men to join women in working at the vast project of reeducating our imaginations.” Robert Scholes allied feminism and semiotics in a racy chapter on the literary supression of the clitoris in his Semiotics and Interpretation. Jonathan Culler used feminist theories of reading to bring deconstruction down to earth, political earth, that is, in his On Deconstruction, And Terry Eagleton, in his sustained advocacy of Marxist and feminist criticism in several recent books and TV appearances, seems to be even more interested in leading women than in joining them in their educational project.
