ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the epistemological, institutional, and political aspects that characterize the change in discipline. Its concern is to save the enterprise of close reading and formal textual analysis for the future study of women's literature. This is done inspite of the awareness that the prior conditions for treating literature in such a way, especially as far as the German language field is concerned, hardly exist – even after more than thirty years since the beginnings of feminist literary criticism. The 'progress' from feminist literary studies to gender studies has certainly enlarged the range of research topics and dimensions of knowledge. The major contribution cultural studies has made to more hermeneutically oriented disciplines such as English has been to bring literary interpretation to such issues as the processes of cultural exchange and the affective and economic relations that structure the transmission of cultural productions.
