Discussion Topic
Exploring Elaine Showalter's concepts and themes in "Towards a Feminist Poetics."
Summary:
In "Towards a Feminist Poetics," Elaine Showalter explores the concepts of gynocriticism and the female literary tradition. She emphasizes the importance of studying women writers and their works to understand the distinct female experience and literary voice, advocating for a separate and equal critical approach to women's literature.
What is the theme of Elaine Showalter's "Towards a Feminist Poetics?"
In this work, Showalter traces a trajectory of modern (mid 19th to 20th century) feminist theory. She states that from 1840-1880, the "feminine era, women's rights were characterized by the struggle to equal men's achievements. The period from 1880-1920, the feminist era, showed how women's writing protested male dominated values and argued for female freedom. In the current period (1920-present), the "female" era, women no longer try to equal or imitate men, as they did in the first phase; women also no longer protest because protest still insists upon recognizing the male dominated system and women's inferior position in it. Rather, in this most current phase, women live autonomously, a women's cultural movement not dependent upon a history of patriarchy.
Showalter explains this female era of the current phase with the term "gynocriticism" and her project has to do with women's autonomy, but particularly regarding what women's writing is and/or...
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In contrast to this angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.
Showalter wants women to go beyond studying and/or deconstructing female stereotypes and to go beyond the ways women have been subjected to secondary status and male systems of thinking. In other words, one of the shifts is to move from speaking of women as victims or as struggling against a male system: to move from this to focusing on women's autonomous experience; not separated from the world of men, but independent from it.
What does Elaine Showalter mean by "poetics" in "Towards a Feminist Poetics"?
Elaine Showalter's 1979 article "Towards a Feminist Poetics" is considered a landmark in the history of feminist literary criticism. Its use of the term "poetics" is very much a product of the period in which it was written and the major trends in literary theory of that time.
The dominant form of literary theory in the 1970s was structuralism, which, as applied to literature, meant a systematic examination of the formal features of texts using concepts from Continental structuralist linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Within this context, a "poetics" is a systematic, quasi-scientific account of how literature functions, in particular its formal qualities and modes of discourse. Although some theorists restrict the term "poetics" to poetry, more commonly it refers to any form of comprehensive literary theory.
The origin of the term goes back to the Platonic school, in which the suffix "ike" was attached to abstract concepts to describe the science of studying those areas. Thus the study of what rhetors do was termed "rhetorike", the study of logic "dialectike", and of poetry "poetike". Thus Aristotle's book on poetry in Greek is titled "Peri [about] Poiêtikês [Poetics]". Because Aristotle's work was so influential, and covered a general theory of imitation by means of words, rather than just verse form, the adoption of the term poetics signals a systematic or comprehensive treatment of verbal artifacts.
Showalter herself, although using the term poetics in the title, actually took the position that much of "poetics" marginalized women, and thus preferred to coin a new label, “gynocritics”, to refer to her own project of feminist literary studies.