Sylvia Plath's confessional poem "Daddy." It talks about "daddy" as both a god (for his power, not for his good attributes) and a devil.
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Sylvia Plath's confessional poem "Daddy." It talks about "daddy" as both a god (for his power, not for his good attributes) and a devil.
Ironically I prefer feminist analysis of men's work, seeing as feminism is basically 'how are women perceived by society (i.e. men)?'. You get a far better insight into how women are seen. The problem with feminist works by females is that they try and generalise things, assuming all women either feel what they feel or are vehemently against it.
You seem to be generalising 'feminist' works now, when i don't really know any poets that write like you're saying.
Depends - I think, personally, Elaine Showalter is boring beyond belief, but Camile Paglia is somewhat interesting - it all comes down to which theorist, and which books they are criticizing - no matter how propped up a text by a critic, if I can't help but feel the gender is the only thing they are really reading, I generally don't like the criticism.Quote:
Originally Posted by kelby_lake
In that sense, generally I gravitate more to radical feminist types, though not particularly to American ones, as I find American feminism very uninteresting in the mainstream.
I mean lets be honest - who actualy likes all those dug up 17th and 18th century female poets? I don't think people actually bother to read them in the text books either, just skip over them, unless they are taking a women writers course. Women, in terms of the English tradition, had been silenced until mid-19th century by my reckoning, with a couple good lyrics floating around before that.
In Italian poetry, though men dominate still, there is a female presence, and that perhaps is an interesting area to search, since the poetry is, and can be read as something other than a deceleration of being feminine in a male literary scene, quite publicly in the 16th century, before English verse had even kicked off.
In a sense feminist interpretation is interesting, but in another way, especially, as I said, with American literary critics, it can be tedious as hell, since there are always critics pining the same theories against every work, and coming up with the same boring results. I guess there are third rate critics of every type though, why not suspect feminist critics to be the same.
Though, I think in modern times feminist criticism as it was known in the 80s and 90s has since become dated discourse itself, with gender-stressing criticism taking more of a forefront - I guess it is only fair, if one is asking how women are constructed in a text, it is just as easy to ask how the critics assumption of gender is constructed, and how their emphasis on sexual difference drives them toward their conclusions on other works.
There are thousands upon thousands - search on any major database for any major poet + the word feminist and you probably will dig some up. Although, I will say that generally these sorts of readings function better in articles than in book length studies.Quote:
Originally Posted by meh!
the point is that she won't bring one up!
You can't construct an argument around vague generalisations, and you can't reply to them either.