Feminism and Toril Moi

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Feminist criticism appeared in Europe and America in the late 1960s. In fact, most scholars were women, so this movement could easily make its way and became influential. It aims at exploring women's role in the western cultures:

" One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere ......... women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, erratic, orphaned of any tradition of its own " 1

Such a trend was taken into account, rejected by male critics and writers, so their task was definitely hard to prove their ideas and their existence as critics; they had to reread women's works. The feminist criticism could be diverged into two divisions; The Anglo Americans who emphasized on recovering, reprinting and revaluating the work. The other division is a French stress upon the literary language by the female.

The French feminist critics were influenced by the Structuralism and the post-Structuralism specially the work of Derrida and Lacan. Some of the feminist critics sought for literary language that is fluid, while others were traditional in their methods and styles. But the women's participation in literature has been limited and for a lot of time excluded completely.

The Feminism, as a term, has many aspects; it is not devoted to literature only. The cultural feminism is one of those aspects which celebrates the woman culture and claims for its analysis. It defends the traditionally ascribed traits to woman such as subjectivity, compassion, closeness to other and reliance on others. The cultural feminists argue for the existence of female institutions as well as the male's. In 1974 Adrienne Rich called for...

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A Dictionary of, Modern Critical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler, (London and New York: Routledge and kegan Paul, 1973).

The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural criticism, ed. Joseph Childers and Gray Hentzi, (New York: Chicheste, 1995).

Other sources are available at, http://www.colambia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023106/0231063253.HTM

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/literature/faculty/toril

http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0198186754

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198186754/ref=aseabsolutsearch05/1030033463-6627077

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