ABSTRACT
Schweickart describes the immasculation of the female reader reading male-centered books, a process to which the feminist reader must be relentlessly resistant. Feminist reading and writing alike are grounded in the interest of producing a community of feminist readers and writers, and in the hope that ultimately this community will expand to include everyone. Feminist or Marxian analysis has at times treated literature as little more than an ideological apparatus for conveying straightforward, manipulative messages. Post-structuralist hermeneutics arises from the recognition that texts do not contain or possess inalienable truth, which it is the reader's responsibility simply to discover by reading. Post-structuralism has meant that readers and reading communities can develop interpretation by interacting with the text from within their own context. The process described by Richardson, Flowers and Guignon as circular in fact looks more like a shape familiar to feminist thinking, that of the spiral, in which closed circular movement is opened to include a linear progress.
