Judith Fetterley

Last updated

Judith Fetterley (born 1938) is a literary scholar known for her work in feminism and women's studies. She was influential in leading a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the contributions of women writing about women's experience, including their perspectives on men in the world.

Contents

Early life and family

Judith Fetterley was born in New York City, New York, although she was raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for several years. Her family moved to Franklin, Indiana when she was ten. She studied in public schools, then earned her B.A. degree at Swarthmore College. She did graduate work at Indiana University Bloomington, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1969.

Career

Fetterley began her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught from 1967 to 1973. She moved to the State University of New York at Albany in 1973 where she taught English and women's studies. She left the University at Albany in 2004, having earned the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Fetterley helped formulate the concept of resistant reading in her 1978 book, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. In addition, she led a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th century and the American canon. She pointed out that American literature had been defined as about men and by men, thus excluding half of the world: women's experience and perspective.

In a series of analyses of works by Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Irving, James, and Mailer, Fetterly in The Resisting Reader places readerly experience at the forefront and argues that American literature—both past and present—has "immasculated" women readers by compelling them to identify with a so-called universal maleness. This immasculation “burns away” [sic] "the merely personal, the purely subjective" and therefore creates in woman readers a "confusion of consciousness" (xi) in which they cannot read as themselves. Citing John Keats’s complaint that poetry exerts a “palpable design” upon readers, Fetterley writes that American literature does something far more insidious: its designs are "impalpable," so women readers fail to recognize its effects (xi). Calling on women readers to intervene, to resist this hailing, Fetterley calls feminist criticism a political act to “to make available to consciousness that which has been left largely unconscious” (xii) and to "change [sic] the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read" (vii).

Now recognized as a classic of feminist literary criticism, The Resisting Reader generated both praise and critique upon publication. Reviewers were quick to point out that in approach, style, and tone, Fetterley echoed Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics had preceded The Resisting Reader by almost a decade. For many feminist commentators, this continuity suggested the growth of feminist literary criticism, as well as the continued need for "naming the felt reality of American fiction." [1] As a review in the Women's Studies International Quarterly puts it, "Fetterley's questions are so often crucial, her observations repeatedly so acute, that they force us to ask how we avoided them in the past." Still others admired the book's feminist heart while expressing discomfort with the vehemence of Fetterley's "tone and emphasis." [2] The book also saw its share of anti-feminist response, most of which faulted Fetterley—and by extension, feminism—for an overly narrow and repetitive focus on sexism and gender. [3] Her arguments around resistant readings in this book have since been challenged by Timothy Bewes, a literary critic associated with postcritique, who proposes an approach that involved "reading with the grain." [4]

In 1980, Fetterley began the project of reading and writing about 19th century American women writers. This resulted in three major publications and a series of articles. Provisions: A Reader from 19th Century American Women appeared in 1985 and American Women Regionalists, co-edited with Marjorie Pryse, appeared 1992. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women and American Literary Culture, written with Marjorie Pryse, appeared in 2003.

Since leaving the academic world, Fetterley has become a semi-professional gardener, with a small perennial garden design business called Perennial Wisdom (perennialwisdom.net). She is currently writing a memoir about her experience as a gardener.

Works

Related Research Articles

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.

Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary theory</span> Systematic study of the nature of literature

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.

Daphne Marlatt, born Buckle, CM, is a Canadian poet and novelist who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Teresa de Lauretis</span> Italian academic (born 1938)

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine Showalter</span> American literary critic, feminist and writer

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Gallop</span> American professor (born 1952)

Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annette Kolodny</span> American academic (1941–2019)

Annette Kolodny was an American feminist literary critic and activist, held the position of College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her major scholarly writings examined the experiences of women on the American frontiers and the projection of female imagery onto the American landscape. Her other writings examined some aspects of feminism after the 1960s; the revision of dominant themes in American studies; and the problems faced by women and minorities in the American academy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toril Moi</span>

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Moi is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. As an undergraduate, she attended University of Bergen, where she studied in the Literature Department. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. She lived in Oxford, United Kingdom from 1979 to 1989. Moi lives in North Carolina. She works on feminist theory and women's writing; on the intersections of literature, philosophy and aesthetics; and is fundamentally concerned with "finding ways of reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to the other."

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.

American literary regionalism, often used interchangeably with the term "local color", is a style or genre of writing in the United States that gained popularity in the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century. In this style of writing, which includes both poetry and prose, the setting is particularly important and writers often emphasize specific features, such as dialect, customs, history and landscape, of a particular region, often one that is "rural and/or provincial". Regionalism is influenced by both 19th-century realism and Romanticism, adhering to a fidelity of description in the narrative but also infusing the tale with exotic or unfamiliar customs, objects, and people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Jane Holmes</span> American novelist

Mary Jane Holmes was an American author who published 39 novels, as well as short stories. Her first novel sold 250,000 copies; and she had total sales of 2 million books in her lifetime, second only to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her books included: "Tempest and Sunshine" (1854), "English Orphans" (1855), "Homestead on the Hillside" (1855), "Lena Rivers" (1856), "Meadow Brook" (1857), "Dora Deane" (1858), "Cousin Maude" (1860), "Marian Gray" 186^, "Hugh Worthington" (1864), "Cameron Vide" (1867). "Rose Mather" (1868), "Ethelyn’s Mistake" (1869), "Edna Browning" (1872), "Mildred" (1877), "Forest House" (1879), "Daisy Thornton," "Queenie Hetherton" (1883), "Christmas Stories" (1884), "Bessie's Fortune" (1885). "Gretchen" (1887), "Marguerite" (1891).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist literature</span> Literary genre supporting feminist goals

Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.

<i>The Thing Around Your Neck</i> 2009 short-story collection by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short-story collection by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, first published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and by Knopf in the US. It received many positive reviews, including: "She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong" ; "Stunning. Like all fine storytellers, she leaves us wanting more".

A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.

Josephine Donovan is an American scholar of comparative literature who is a professor emerita of English in the Department of English at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research and expertise has covered feminist theory, feminist criticism, animal ethics, and both early modern and American literature with a special focus on American writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the local colorists. She recently extended her study of local color literature to the European tradition. Along with Marti Kheel, Carol J. Adams, and others, Donovan introduced ecofeminist care theory, rooted in cultural feminism, to the field of animal ethics. Her published corpus includes ten books, five edited books, over fifty articles, and seven short stories.

Feminist poetry is inspired by, promotes, or elaborates on feminist principles and ideas. It might be written with the conscious aim of expressing feminist principles, although sometimes it is identified as feminist by critics in a later era. Some writers are thought to express feminist ideas even if the writer was not an active member of the political movement during their era. Many feminist movements, however, have embraced poetry as a vehicle for communicating with public audiences through anthologies, poetry collections, and public readings.

In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."

Tania Modleski is an American feminist scholar and cultural critic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

References

  1. ↑ Edwards, Lee (Winter 1979). "Review of The Resisting Reader". Signs. 5 (2): 351–354. doi:10.1086/493716 – via JSTOR.
  2. ↑ Kaston, Carren (Fall 1980). "Review of The Resisting Reader". The Henry James Review. 2 (1): 68–69. doi:10.1353/hjr.2010.0022. S2CID   191966470.
  3. ↑ Monteiro, George (Summer 1983). "Review of The Resisting Reader". Modern Language Studies. 13 (3): 123–125. doi:10.2307/3194186. JSTOR   3194186.
  4. ↑ Bewes, Timothy (2010). "Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism". Differences. 21 (3): 1–33. doi: 10.1215/10407391-2010-007 .

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.