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Before I took this class, I took issue with feminist criticism because I thought great literature (pretty much all art for that matter) (and which depends on your definition of "great") transcends all those racial, sexual, socio-economical lines we draw when we don't have our head in a book.

I still have a lingering habit to question the idea of feminist criticism, or really any theory that interprets with a political end in mind - particularly because a lot of books I've loved and which have had a lasting effect on me have male protagonists, and I've never considered reading them to "cause me grave psychic damage" (41) to the way I conceive of myself as a female, as Schweickart posits that it does.

However, Schweickart's essay pointed out a number of convincing reasons why feminist criticism is necessary, especially for the field of reader-response criticism, but also raised some questions about its limitations and problems with its proposed solutions.

To be more specific, I thought it was interesting that Schweickart depicts reader-response criticism as "utopian" in the sense that it overlooks race, sex, class, etc. and doesn’t consider feelings of discord that misrepresentation in literature, i.e. Woolf and Malcolm X's stories of reading, arouses in the unspoken-for reader. The feminist perspective is a solution to making the utopia a reality, it's a "mode of praxis" (39) which will change the world and the face of literature, and boost the voice of women to match those of men.

Feminist criticism will also ideally break the cycle of canonization which leads to androcentric standards. Women's literature must be more canonized than it has been, and the criteria by which they're judged should be shifted to accomodate the female perspective (as well as all perspectives); I also agree that male texts are not inherently damaging, only the fact that the "experience of immasculation is paradigmatic" for female readers is.

She says the aim of feminist critics is that "of recovering, articulating, and elaborating positive expressions of women's point of view" and celebrating its survival. This I agree with. It's mostly her distinction between readings of male and female texts, that one should be read impersonally, and one very personally, that I feel uneasy about. Shouldn't they all be read the same way? And what about the idea that an author should be everyone and no one?

I also hope her "dialogic model" is used more often in interpreting texts by all authors.