That for quite some time intellectuals in general, and feminist critics in particular, have devised aesthetically diverse strategies – not only within the parameters of the memoir – is transparently apparent. From Plato’s Symposium to Hazlitt’s “My First Acquaintance with Poets” and Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” after all, philosophical texts and aesthetic meditations have employed characters, settings, dialogues, plots, and symbols. And in the history of feminist criticism, Virginia Woolf was not alone in honing a series of personae whose meditations required storytelling about, in her case, the fictional Judith Shakespeare imagined by one Mary Beton after a lunch at Oxbridge, followed by a visit to the British Museum. Noteworthy and experimental texts replete with lyrical repetitions, mystic images, and parodic parables have been produced by quite a few pioneers in the so-called second wave, including Gloria Steinem, Tillie Olsen, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, Gloria Anzaldúa, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Jane Tompkins. Ruth Salvaggio’s The Sounds of Feminist Theory and Linda Garber’s Identity Poetics illuminate aspects of this phenomenon. Why shouldn’t we – who study poems and novels, biographies and films, plays and memoirs – learn how to tap the aesthetic pleasures that drew us toward literature in the first place?
What, during the conference proceedings, Ann Douglas called the “extraordinary imperial candor” of Carolyn Heilbrun can still be experienced by readers of her detective fiction as well as her biographical, autobiographical, and critical books, all of which in various ways demonstrate her attempts to engage an audience beyond the academy. There is much to be learned, too, from the feminist journalists we all enjoy reading, writers like Katie Roiphe and Barbara Ehrenreich. In these reactionary times, warfare and welfare, religion and globalism, bioengineering and ecological disasters require the scrutiny feminists inside and outside literature departments have trained themselves to bring to such tangled but crucially important matters. Not just the topics and the forms, but the prevailing attitude toward publication itself needs scrutiny. The very structure of the Columbia conference – at which critics read from books in print – deviated from academic business as usual, since at a typical conference one is pretty much forbidden to read what is already in print, pretty much expected to churn out something new. More like a creative writing event, the format of the celebration honoring Carolyn testified to the ongoing value of the work that had been produced, the need to hear what might have been read before so as to be surprised by new meanings or renewed shocks at what must be apprized somewhat differently.
“Things vanish when you don’t write them down,” Mary Ann Caws explains in her memoir. And I believe that some of the things that have vanished from feminist criticism could be preserved by more innovative and capacious approaches to it. Teaching, the classroom, our relationship to the undergraduates in our discussion sections or to the graduate students in our dissertation seminars: these are subjects that could be more fully integrated into feminist criticism, as could our relationships with each other as colleagues on committees, editorial boards, and institutes, especially during a period when the hierarchical structures of the academy are exerting pressures detrimental to the equality for women that feminists always seek to foster. Given the downsizing of the humanities, feminists need to enter into conversations about education that will inevitably impinge on gender and sexuality studies classes within traditional departments but also in women’s and gender studies programs and departments. What in particular the teaching of literature means could involve us, too, in discussions about the largely unaddressed subject of aesthetics – not just its ideological significance, but its affective import for people from various backgrounds and with divergent tastes and values.
