Feminist Critique And Psychodynamic Concepts With Special Reference To Elaine Showalter’s ‘Towards A Feminist Poetics’: A Preview

Abstract

Elaine Showalter is a popular American feminist, social activist and literary critic, who is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States Academia. She splits feminist criticism mainly into two categories- ‘Woman as reader’ and ‘Woman as writer’. She advocates that in woman as reader — woman is treated as the consumer of male-produced literature. This is with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. This kind of analysis may be called as the feminist critique. Like other kinds of critique, it is a historically grounded inquiry to probe the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history.

According to Showalter, the second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer to consider woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. An attempt is made in this paper to include the subjects of psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history and the studies of particular writers and their works. So to say, no term exists in English for such a specialized discourse. This paper is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems in the criticism of Elaine Showalter.