ABSTRACT
What is Donoghue after in a piece subtitled “feminism’s agenda in literary studies”? He explains that he wanted to see what’s been happening in feminist criticism since the publication of Sexual Politics in 1970. Unfazed by the vast amount of reading such a task generates-that comes with the territory: “Who can keep up with anything these days?”—the man admits to being perplexed by a more elusive quantity: “The difficulty, rather, is to determine what the present context of feeling is.” Why is it necessary for the man to take the measure of women’s feelings? Donoghue’s move to cast feminist criticism as a matter of feeling, rather than intellectual debate will prove to be both crucial to the shape of the essay and symptomatic of its animating pathology. (He thus takes Sexual Politics as origin-as opposed to say, Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women or Ellen Moers’s Literary Women-because of the “sentiments and passions” it provoked.) The decision to understand the context of feminist thinking as a climate of emotion-angry ones, as it will shortly emerge-sets the stage for the trivialization and domestication of feminist scholarship Donoghue orchestrates in the rest of the piece and in which the challenge to epistemology that underwrites feminist literary studies takes on the simplicities of melodrama, when it’s not cat fights.
