Author Archives
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Gynocriticism A Brief Note
A concept introduced by Elaine Showalter in Towards a Feminist Poetics gynocriticism refers to a kind of criticism with woman as writer/producer of textual meaning, as against woman as reader (feminist critique). Being concerned with the specificity of women’s writings (gynotexts)… Read More ›
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Elaine Showalter as a Feminist Critic
Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, which is a woman-centric approach to literary analysis, Her A Literature of their Own discusses the -female literary tradition which she analyses as an evolution through three… Read More ›
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Anglo-American and French Feminisms
The Feminist movement in America received great stimulus from the 1960s’ civil rights movement, and in Britain it has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. Thus Anglo-American… Read More ›
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Ecriture Feminine
Introduced by Helene Cixous in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, ecriture feminine refers to a uniquely feminine style of writing characterised by disruptions in the text, such as gaps, silences, puns, new images and so on. It is… Read More ›
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The Influence of Poststructuralism on Feminism
With the arrival of Poststructuralism on the critical scene, Feminism emerged as more eclectic and expanded its horizons to merge into the realms of other contemporary theories, thus giving rise to a plethora of rampant and dynamically developing areas such… Read More ›
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Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
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The Feminist Dictum “the Personal is the Political”
A frequently heard feminist rallying cry, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, and a central doctrine of the second-wave feminists, who used its underlying meaning in their writings, speeches, consciousness-rising, and other other activities, the concept “the personal is… Read More ›
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Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated… Read More ›
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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to Feminism
The 18th century British writer Mary Wollstonecraft‘s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional feminity have been significant in the development of feminism. Influenced by European Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)… Read More ›
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Feminism: An Essay
Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman… Read More ›
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Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory
A philosopher, psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, CG Jung treated the human self as the totality of all psychic processes considering the Freudian concept of individual consciousness as incomplete and unnecessarily negative, Jung proposed a second and far deeper… Read More ›
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Lacan’s Concept of Mirror Stage
Lacan‘s reinterpretation of Freud, with the central focus on language, brought about a post-structuralist turn to psychoanalytic theory. In his paper titled Mirror Stage (1949), Lacan expounds the concept of the mirror stage that occurs between 6-18 months of a child’s development, when… Read More ›
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Jacques Lacan’s Reinterpretation of Freud
Jacques Lacan, who is often referred to as the “French Freud” transposed Freudian concepts into the realm of Saussurean structural linguistics, focussing on the operations of the process of signification, instead of the human mind as such. Lacanian reading attempted… Read More ›
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Feminist Critique of Freud
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›
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Freud’s Critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Freued’s theory of Oedipus Complex is best demonstrated in his analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus complex is the strong affinity that the child develops for his mother in its intense urge to possess the mother, wishes to kill the father…. Read More ›
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Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (propelled into this arena by his reading of Freud and Salvador Dali) achieved a place in the literary critical canon. The linguistic, philosophical and… Read More ›
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Freudian Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among the series of waves in the post war period is based on the specific premises of the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality, developed by the… Read More ›
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Culture Industry
The Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer produced an incisive critique of modern culture through their work The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they introduced the term “Culture industry,” to describe mass cultural forms which, in the wake… Read More ›
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Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
While lauding 19th century Realism, Lukacs attacked modernist experimental writers as “decadent” instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist… Read More ›
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Fredric Jameson as a Neo-Marxist Critic
Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectic theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connections of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognises the need to see its… Read More ›
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