ABSTRACT
From the arts, especially modernist and postmodernist fiction, to the philosophies, a deep dissatisfaction with science has led to a radical re-evaluation of the relationships between what Walter Benjamin called direct, lived experience as opposed to retrospective, privileged, inward experience. Whatever the strange intricacies of these new wanderings through the demise of Truth in Experience, woman is that element most discursively present. A cultural critic who judges a fiction as not true judges it as being beyond reason which is all it ever set out to be in the traditional scheme of things. To judge a text as wrong, as not having reason, is not to disrupt anything, but is instead, in a terrible twist, to confirm the viability of the original metaphysical opposition. Clearly, traditional acts of literary criticism based in this kind of judgment are henceforth seen to be caught in a strange, mutually congratulatory relationship with the text they are judging.
