SOURCE: Fuss, Diana. “Getting into History.” Arizona Quarterly 45, no. 4 (winter 1989): 95-108.

[In the following essay, Fuss discusses Sexual/Textual Politics in terms of recent feminist approaches to historicism that emphasize histories of feminism instead of feminist theories of history.]

The problem may be not how to get into history, but how to get out of it.

—Hayden White, “Getting Out of History”

While historians like Hayden White have busily been trying to get out of history, feminist literary critics have been just as energetically trying to get into it.¹ Since women as historical subjects are rarely included in “History” to begin with, the strong feminist interest in forging a new historicity that moves across and against “his story” is not surprising. What is more surprising perhaps is the particular form these new feminist approaches to historicism are taking: feminism enacts its engagement with history through a fetishistic fascination with its own historical roots both as a theory and as a practice. But this may be precisely the problem: histories of feminist theory have come to stand in for more rigorous feminist theories of history. Feminism's vexed relation to historicism is not so much alleviated as exacerbated by these recent attempts to deal with the category of history by tracing feminism's own genealogical roots. The exercise is not a pointless one (far from it); it is simply insufficient to answer the still serious charges of “ahistoricism” that seem to plague feminist theorists at every turn, even and especially those self-professed materialist literary critics who have made the most impassioned and most persuasive pleas for a historicist feminism.

Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) is arguably the first systematic investigation of feminist literary criticism's theoretical presuppositions, and it has already received the serious and sustained attention such innovative critical work deserves.² My interest in this early survey is motivated less by the book's central discussion of French “theoreticism” versus American “empiricism” and more by Moi's own somewhat oblique endorsement of literary “historicism.” Sexual/Textual Politics offers materialist historicism as a corrective and a counterbalance to a metaphysical essentialism which Moi believes compromises, and ultimately depoliticizes, the work of many of America's best known and most widely read feminist literary critics (Elaine Showalter, Annette Kolodny, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar). This lucidly written and eminently readable book makes some valuable points on the subject of feminism's relation to historicism, not the least among them the useful distinction between “the historical” and “historicism.” Luce Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme, for example, follows a certain historical continuum (an inverse trajectory from Freud to Plato) but stops short of practicing a more radical historicism by persistently refusing to engage with the particular modalities of patriarchal logic and the changing specificities of phallocentric economies that would prevent any simple conflation of classical and contemporary discourses. It is not that a text like Irigaray's Speculum is unhistorical, Moi believes; it is simply that this kind of work “signally fails to study the historically changing impact of patriarchal discourses on women” (148). Moreover, history without historicism precludes the recognition that “all forms of radical thought inevitably remain mortgaged to the very historical categories they seek to transcend” (88). A more ambitious understanding of historiography is needed in order to resist the steady pull toward a sedimentation of women into Woman, an understanding that can only be secured through a more direct interfacing with materialist thought. It is difficult not to wonder, along with Moi, why feminist literary critics have been reluctant to take up the work of materialist theorists (Moi names Gramsci, Benjamin, and Adorno, to which I would add Althusser, White, Jameson, Hindess, and Hirst)—a resistance all the more curious in light of the careful, usually rigorous, and often exhaustive attention paid to their psychoanalytic and deconstructionist colleagues (Derrida, Freud, Lacan).

But Moi's compact and precise argument against essentialism and for historicism is not, in fact, free of the very pitfalls she detects in the “patriarchal humanism” of Anglo-American critics. Moi uncovers traces of essentialist thinking in every Anglo-American feminist critic she addresses, wedding the category irreducibly to a certain nationalist identity and coming dangerously close in the process to positing a naturalized relation between them. However, my claim is not simply that Moi, an anti-essentialist materialist, is herself co-implicated in the terms of her dismissal of Anglo-American criticism, but that it is precisely her anti-essentialism that blocks her materialism. We see the way in which this strategic interference operates most clearly in Moi's anti-essentialist designation of nationalities as positions any subject can fill: “the terms ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘French’ must not be taken to represent purely national demarcations: they do not signal the critic's birthplace but the intellectual tradition within which they work” (xiv). By such a logic, any critic who indulges in a form of patriarchal humanism or metaphysical essentialism merits the designation “Anglo-American,” no matter what that critic's self-proclaimed national affiliations and sympathies. (Thus, to whatever degree Irigaray indulges in ahistoricism and idealism, she is Anglo-American rather than French.) But the essentialism Moi attempts to displace is not so much soundly routed as slyly rerouted. In fact, essentialism merely works its logic elsewhere: Moi's claim is not that to be an Anglo-American is to be, necessarily, an essentialist; rather her claim is that to be an essentialist is to be, ipso facto, an Anglo-American. Such a gesture dehistoricizes the speaking subject, removes the diverse works of Anglo-American critics from the precise sociopolitical frames which produced them and which may have overdetermined the essentialism for which they are currently faulted. This is certainly not to say that only an essentialist can successfully practice a materialist criticism; on the contrary, it is merely to suggest that an effective anti-essentialist materialism must be open to investigating why a subject might deploy certain essentialist gestures at a particular historical moment and for what ends; in other words, the anti-essentialist materialist must entertain the more difficult question of why, when, and where essentialism might be historically necessitated and politically interventionary.

Janet Todd's Feminist Literary History (1988) enters the debate at this juncture, seeking both to place “Anglo-American” feminist criticism in historical perspective and to argue for its continued efficacy at a historical moment when History itself is said to be “in crisis.” Todd's central strategy for revalidating American feminist criticism is to historicize socio-historicism—an important and timely project in my mind. But although I find myself fundamentally in sympathy with Todd's stated goal—to arrive at a more measured and less hasty assessment of the strengths and limitations of feminist literary history—I nonetheless find the book profoundly unsettling, not least because of Todd's own rather generalizing and, regrettably, rather hasty statements about feminist poststructuralism. My critical affinities for the very forms of poststructuralism Todd readily denounces (Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction) doubtless make me overly sensitive to the terms of abuse levelled against them in this book. But it seems equally clear to me that the book's repression of repression, its desire not to desire, and its pervasive paranoia in the face of a bogey called “theory” ultimately sabotage Todd's own well-intentioned efforts to make a case for the theoretical sophistication and critical urgency of feminist literary history.

The book's repudiation of psychoanalysis begins early with the author's confession that her reassessment of the “foremothers” of feminist criticism (the socio-historical critics) is indeed motivated by “filial piety” for figures such as Elaine Showalter, but that she still remains unconvinced that “we must be oedipal” (2). I would contend that the real “foremother” of Feminist Literary History, the figure who provokes the greatest degree of oedipal anxiety on Todd's part (all the more manifest in the acute desire to deny oedipality) is not Elaine Showalter but Toril Moi. Though ostensibly a defense of Anglo-American feminist critics, and a counter-attack on Moi's spirited analysis of socio-historicism's complicities with patriarchal humanism, Todd's book uncannily rehearses many of the same arguments against these writers that Moi elaborates in Sexual/Textual Politics. By bracketing psychoanalysis and questions of oedipality so completely, Todd misses the opportunity to interrogate her transference not onto Showalter but onto Moi and so replicates many of the same difficulties which weaken the Moi book.

Moi's Feminist Literary Theory (the frequently overlooked subtitle of Sexual/Textual Politics) becomes Feminist Literary History in Todd's revisionary textual politics. Indeed, “History” erases “Theory” in a critical substitution which accurately summarizes Todd's central argument: we must turn away from ahistoricizing poststructuralist theories of Woman as a theoretical operation and turn towards more historically specific and empirically grounded analyses of “actual” women engaged in the material practice of writing. But if Moi's repeated accusations of essentialism against Anglo-American feminism ultimately succeed only in further reifying an already hypostatized category, counter-invocations of ahistoricism are similarly suspect when used indiscriminately, in a paradoxically dehistoricized way. The charge of ahistoricism is itself all too often ahistorically wielded; the difference between the critique and the terms or conditions of its deployment is sometimes no difference at all. Essentialism fails to deliver as an irrefutable term of disapprobation in Sexual/Textual Politics because it is predicated on the contradictory assumption that essentialism is, in essence, reactionary and wholly indissociable from another category, patriarchy, whose essentialist status goes completely uninterrogated in Moi's work. Ahistoricism fails in the same way to operate as a persuasive method of critical dismissal in Feminist Literary History because the sign “history” itself is scarcely historicized and curiously depoliticized. History emerges in Todd's analysis as a reliable, stable, homogeneous monolith, invested with immense critical weight and almost mythical restorative powers. What is missing from both Moi's and Todd's analyses is a rigorous theory of history. While Moi needs to historicize “essence,” Todd needs to de-essentialize “history.” Neither writer's project, as it stands, seems entirely adequate.

Both Moi and Todd purport to be materialists, which is puzzling, given their failure to engage in any sustained way with poststructuralist materialism. The problem is particularly acute in Todd's book where poststructuralism becomes identified with psychoanalysis and deconstruction, but not materialism. “History” is opposed to “Theory” in Todd's thinking, a questionable move that leads to several untenable conclusions: materialism is untheoretical; theory does not include practice; history is the proper antidote for theory. Relegating poststructuralism to the fields of psychoanalysis and deconstruction permits Todd to ignore a whole tradition of Marxist French feminist thought, including the work of committed materialists like Monique Wittig, Monique Plaza, Christine Delphy, and Catherine Clément. To admit these neglected writers into her pantheon of poststructuralists would certainly disarrange the binary symmetry of the French poststructuralist/American socio-historicist dichotomy that Todd borrows uncritically from Moi. One suspects that these writers are passed over because their inclusion would challenge Todd's central claim that the “French feminists” (a far more heterogeneous group than either Todd or Moi are willing to acknowledge) collectively ignore history, abjure politics, and replace real, material women with the metaphysical sign Woman.

Within the field of lesbian feminism, the French materialists (Wittig, Plaza, Delphy, Clément) are at least as well known as their psychoanalytic counterparts (Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva). But lesbian feminism, along with minority women's criticism, is a subject both Moi and Todd prefer not to discuss at any great length. In fact, both self-consciously and apologetically exclude discussions of black and lesbian critics, preferring to focus instead on more “theoretical” (Moi) or more “mainline” (Todd) feminists. Since the omission of black and lesbian criticism is a particularly serious problem in both books, the authors' respective reasons for jettisoning these important subjects are worth investigating a little more closely. Moi's justification appears halfway through the book, at the critical transition point from “Anglo-American Feminist Criticism” to “French Feminist Theory”:

Some feminists might wonder why I have said nothing about black or lesbian (or black-lesbian) feminist criticism in America in this survey. The answer is simple: this book purports to deal with the theoretical aspects of feminist criticism. So far, lesbian and/or black feminist criticism have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism.

(86)

I think Moi needs to demonstrate the primary assumption here that “it is the contents of her work that make the lesbian critic's study different, not her method” (86). Do lesbian or black critics really have nothing to offer “methodologically” or “theoretically” to the larger body of feminist criticism Moi discusses? Is the body of Anglo-American feminist criticism really as monolithic in terms of method as Moi seems to suggest? Moreover, even if we agree that marginal feminisms “have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism,” then, all things being equal, why doesn't Moi consider any of them? The disregard of entire schools of feminist thought in a book which purports to be a general survey and critical introduction to feminist theory, and which attempts to expose and to investigate the politics of textual criticism, is a curious oversight indeed, and it highlights the need for work which will begin to investigate the way in which poststructuralism can be entirely complicit with the hegemony it purportedly seeks to undermine.

Todd's explanation for the relative absence of black and lesbian criticism (she does in fact refer, albeit briefly, to Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and Catharine Stimpson) in her otherwise wide-ranging survey is similarly ingenuous, although unlike Moi she does take pains to confer the requisite token praise on that which she nonetheless feels compelled to elide:

I will start with the early days in the 1970s, often concentrating on Elaine Showalter who, as a supremely reactive writer, I will use as representative of the various changes and modifications in this criticism. By doing so I am aware that I am omitting many other lines of development, especially those of black and lesbian critics whose work is at the moment among the richest and most provocative in the socio-historical mode, but which in the early years tended to exist in the space provided by the more popular mainline critics. For my account I will inevitably have to distort history to some extent.

(5)

Exactly whose work existed in whose space here? And why is it presumed that there was (and is?) only one “space”? At what cost does Todd selectively target Showalter as her “representative” socio-historical critic, and what does this choice suggest about feminist literary history's pretenses towards diversity and difference? Considerably later in the book, Todd singles out lesbian and black contributions to feminist literary history as a promising future possibility: “Much is probably going to come from groups of women who identify themselves as feminist and something else, like black or lesbian, either as critics or creative writers” (94). If the archival enterprise of unearthing lost women writers is what Todd values most in socio-historical criticism, it is surprising that she is unaware of the substantial contribution lesbian and black writers and critics have already made to feminist literary history. The deployment of the speculative future tense here (“Much is probably going to come …”) is alarming. At the very least I think we can say that if the confrontation between “Anglo-American criticism” and “French feminist theory” can be accurately metaphorized, in Todd's approving analogy, as “an exciting spectator sport” (6), then perhaps we need to ask a little more responsibly who is really relegated to the sidelines. And we need to explore how the rules of the game can be redefined to transform a match of trans-Atlantic critical doubles into a more lively and integrated international team sport.

Let me return for a moment to Feminist Literary History's central theory/history opposition and its concurrent repudiation of psychoanalysis—the twin poles of Todd's central argument. Todd views psychoanalysis as a “timeless model” that mystifies history: “women are, after all, in history as material entities” (84). This approach is explicitly anti-semiotic: Todd assumes that any investigation of the sign Woman necessarily ignores the history of women; that theories of representation de-materialize their subjects; and that theory, not history, is guilty of the sin of reification and essentialism. Of course, poststructuralist theories of representation can scarcely be said to ignore history, and further, emphasizing the social and psychical construction of the subject in no way denies the existence of real, material women. Indeed, the materiality of discourse is a constant theme amongst French materialist thinkers. As Monique Wittig repeatedly reminds us in her work: “there is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have, to act materially and actually upon our bodies and our minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract” (106). That women are social subjects, and not just linguistic signs, is a far less controversial claim than Todd makes it out to be. And one could even say that Todd is also far more of a semiotician than she herself seems to know. It is necessary to cite the full sentence from which the assertion of women's materiality is taken in order to appreciate a certain irony in her denunciations of semiotics:

Women are, after all, in history as material entities; they are more than mothers, and they form a kind of non-identical paradigm of the historical process itself.

(84)

A decoding of women as “paradigms” of the historical process is nothing if not semiotic.

Feminist Literary History is a study of one critic's failed attempts to exorcise the demon within, the demon called “theory.” Todd is adamant in her rejection of the symptomatic readings practiced by psychoanalytic critics—readings which in her opinion focus more on what is not said than on what is. She herself endorses “ideologically aware” readings (following the French structuralist Louis Althusser) and cautions against a welding of ideology and psychoanalysis since such a union “may use the message of the absences and silences to obscure the message of what is present, may in other words privilege the presumed deep structure at the expense of the historical surface” (86). One might legitimately question why history is presumed to lie on the surface of the text. (The entire import of Althusser's revision of Marx is to suggest quite otherwise.) Such a claim can only be foregrounded by burying Althusser's rather considerable debt to Lacan, ignoring his symptomatic readings of Marx, and suspending his theorization of history as a displaced series of ruptured discontinuities rather than a smooth surface continuum. Todd advocates practicing ideological hermeneutics in place of Freudian readings, but interestingly her ideological hermeneutics, so far as I can tell, is simply a symptomatic reading in materialist clothing: “Criticism using the notion of ideology focuses both on what is stressed as intentional and on what appears subliminal, discordant and unintentional” (86). If it is true that what is repressed in Todd's analysis is repression, then what we have here is the literal return of the repressed.

Part of Todd's strategy for legitimizing socio-historicism is to historicize psychoanalysis (a valid and ambitious undertaking), but she does not, in fact, historicize psychoanalysis so much as simply provide reasons for putting it on hold until the necessary empirical work on “the texts themselves” has been completed. One of the book's main cautions addressed to literary critics is a warning not to succumb to the temptation to “prematurely psychoanalyze” (98). A stage model for the practice of feminist literary criticism is implicitly prescribed: the feminist critic should begin with archival and empirical work (which would include the study of genre, the historical placement of writers, and the recovery of lost women authors) and only then proceed to activate, on an optional basis, other possible critical discourses—psychoanalysis and deconstruction, for example. In other words, gynocritics first, gynesis second—gynocritics occupying the privileged space of feminist criticism's primary “base” and gynesis inhabiting the secondary position of “occasional commentary, a critique, not a complement” (138).³ The idea that “theory” might be integral to the literary critical enterprise from its very inception, that gynesis is thoroughly co-implicated with gynocritics, is an idea strangely anathema to Todd.

In the end Todd's stage model works to privilege the particular kind of feminist criticism she herself practices so well: empirical, generic, archival, socio-historical criticism. Such work is useful and important but not necessarily the only point of legitimate departure for all feminist investigations. I am sympathetic to Todd's oft-repeated complaint that much socio-historical criticism privileges the Victorian and Modern periods and ignores eighteenth-century women writers altogether. But I also remain unconvinced that the way to compensate for this critical oversight in feminist criticism is to follow the lead of eighteenth-century women writers themselves and become “political and ethical historians” (116). My resistance to the program of politico-ethical criticism Todd supports is motivated not by any skepticism over the importance of history for our critical readings (Todd is surely right to insist that feminist inquiry in general can benefit from more rigorous acts of historicization), but by a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of history elaborated in the book. Too often the challenge to historicize is reduced to its most simplistic empirical foundations: a mere call to provide dates and places, to accumulate more data. “More is better” in this line of thinking. Thus, adding eighteenth-century women writers to The Madwoman in the Attic is Todd's corrective to Gilbert and Gubar's already massive book, but would expanding to encompass another century really solve all the problems of socio-historical criticism? While historicizing feminist literary history is a laudable goal, Todd's recommendations tend to be rather short on specifics. In attempting to demonstrate that theory de-historicizes, Todd neglects to give us a full accounting of her own theory of history. Dichotomizing theory and history is an obfuscating tactic at best, and the book suffers immeasurably because of it. I can't help but wonder in the end if the socio-historical critics Todd seeks to defend might better be served in some other way—perhaps by a more detailed accounting of the various theories of histories they construct and by a less defensive stance on the uses and abuses of something only vaguely defined as “theory.”

While literary critical histories of theory often fail to account for their own theories of history, theoretical investigations of history often fail to acknowledge their own literariness or, more properly, their own textuality (see Jameson). Happily, such is not the case with Denise Riley's “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), one of the most recent (and, in my mind, most successful) attempts to come to terms with the tricky category of history, this time by pursuing in archaeological fashion the precise textualizations and contextualizations of the social production of “women.” Riley's book is an especially valuable contribution to the ongoing discussions of women's place in history because it advances the argument beyond the question “Does history have a sex?” (Does “his story” ever include “her story”?) to the less obvious but currently more pressing question, “Does a sex have a history?” Riley, a philosopher of women's social history, investigates how sexual categorizations are discursively produced and culturally mobilized. Her strategy is to uncover the regime of codes that consolidate gendered categories, insisting on the “tactical” need to retain “women” as a political category while simultaneously recognizing that as a social category “women” is “eternally compromised,” always fractured and overwritten by a multitude of other cultural categorizations. Indeed the historical instability of the sign “women” is tenured as the very precondition of feminism; to those who see the deconstruction of gender as a threat to feminist politics, Riley offers the possibility that the very ambiguity of “women” constitutes the grounds of feminism's radical impossibility.

For Riley it is not enough simply to insert “women” into “history”; we need to simultaneously historicize “women” as a socially constructed category. And one cannot, of course, elaborate a history of the category of “women” without also examining the production of other intricated categories like race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, nationality, and so on. Riley's terminology is seductive. Terms like “temporalities,” “periodicities,” “arrangements,” “alignments,” “consolidations,” “classifications,” “proximities,” and “fluctuations” carry more than just metaphorical weight; they point to Riley's own critical affiliation with the early Foucauldian practice of historical archaeology. For Foucault, “history” is layered rather than linear, sedimented rather than sequential. Identities are historically massified and produced through a process of cultural accretions—a perpetual semiosis. Thus Riley's heavy reliance on geological tropes to advance her main argument is not accidental; “sedimentations,” “petrifications,” and “massifications” all suggest that it is the job of the feminist historian to excavate the shifting layers of the collectivity we call “women” to uncover the stages and processes which have produced its current consolidations.

The naturalism of the geological metaphor suggests that essentialism may be at play even in an archaeological practice of historicization, although Riley is careful to point out that there is no essential bedrock beneath the layers of historical massifications, that “there is no deep natural collectivity of women's bodies which precedes some subsequent arrangement of them through history or biopolitics” (106).⁴ Even so, it is entirely possible to argue here that historicism works not against essentialism (as often argued)⁵ but through it—or rather, simultaneously against and through the logic it seeks to displace, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my earlier readings of Sexual/Textual Politics and Feminist Literary History. What distinguishes Riley's approach to the problem of “Woman versus women” from Moi's or Todd's approaches to this same issue is the historian's recognition that “women” no less than “Woman” can be an essentialist category: “below the newly pluralized surfaces, the old problems still linger” (99). Riley does not seek to purify feminism of essentialism so much as to confront this disreputable category (itself a historically variable construct) as the constitutive difference of feminism. “Women” under erasure becomes the “sine qua non” of feminism (2).

One way to de-essentialize essentialism, then, is to historicize the sign “essence.” But first we need a theory of history which is unafraid to engage with the terms of its own historical (im)possibilities and which therefore resists the pull back into a timid periodization. To get back into history, what we need is not a master-narrative of History but a narrative that can master “His story” while still avoiding the temptation to turn “Feminism” into a new hegemony. As I read through the current histories of feminist theory, I am reminded again of a line from the cultural historian Hayden White: “If one is going to ‘go to history,’ one had better have an address in mind” (11). It is not, perhaps, that feminist literary critics need a specific address in mind, a sure point of destination for our critical (ad)ventures, but it may just be that the old maps are insufficient to take us to where we want to go. Perhaps it is time to begin designing new maps of our own: a feminist cartography that will make possible a more radical historiography.

Notes

1. This essay will consider three recent examples: Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory; Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History; Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History.

2. Both Hester Eisenstein (1983) and Josephine Donovan (1985) published critical overviews of feminist theory shortly before Moi's book appeared, but both limit their attention predominantly to the terrain of American feminist thought while simultaneously encompassing theory not relegated to the field of literature. Closer in methodology and purpose to Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics is K. K. Ruthven's Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (1984). For two particularly incisive critiques of Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, see Schor and Smith.

3. Elaine Showalter defines gynocritics as “the study of women as writers” which locates the “difference” of women's writing in the formalist properties of the text—in the “history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women” (14-15). Alice Jardine's gynesis signifies an operation, a procedure, a process which involves “the putting into discourse of ‘woman’” (25)—a radical strategy of reading and writing that poses an internal challenge to phallocratic discourse and marks the very limit of theoretical possibility.

4. Foucault himself persistently disassociates “archaeology” from “geology” precisely to undermine any notion of historicization as a search for lost beginnings; Riley's pervasive use of metaphors from the physical sciences tends occasionally to confuse this important distinction and to work against her stated assumption that there is no “rock bottom” or historical foundation beneath the cultural layerings.

5. See, for example, Smith and Nelson.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1969.

Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

Eisenstein, Hester. Contemporary Feminist Thought. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l'autre femme (1974). Trans. Gillian C. Gill as Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

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Nelson, Cary. “Men, Feminism: The Materiality of Discourse.” In Men in Feminism. Ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

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Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Ruthven, K. K. Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Schor, Naomi. “Introducing Feminism.” Paragraph 8 (Oxford University Press, 1986): 94-101.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary History. New York: Routledge, 1988.

White, Hayden. “Getting Out of History.” Diacritics 12.3 (Fall 1982): 2-13.

Wittig, Monique. “The Straight Mind.” Feminist Issues 1.1 (Summer 1980): 103-11.