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Still trying to catch up after a very hectic work week, and to post at least a few thoughts sparked by the week 2 readings.

First, it was pleasant to find the articles not only thought-provoking, but also (for me) rather entertaining to read.  Conversational rather than pedantic.

I've been only sort of vaguely aware of the reader-response theory, which I guess is part of the deconstructionist thrust, but it was interesting to see the interplay between that and the possibility of a feminist critical approach, whatever that may turn out to be, or have been.

What it brought to mind, and shed interesting light on, is the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, which seems like way too much fun to be classified at Borders as "literary fiction."  (Having been out of touch with academe for decades,  and having been a Physics major at Bryn Mawr who later went on to get an MBA and turn into a tax accountant, I haven't quite been following what constitutes the literary canon of the late 20th and early 21st century.  I've just been reading whatever I've run across that looks interesting.  So I'm not sure what the canonical answer is to the question of what feminist (or any other flavor of) literary criticism is appropriately applied to.)  Anyway, the Fforde series has an interesting take on the "reading experience."

w/r/t Sosnowski, I was interested in his invocation of Popper's falsifiability as the standard of a path to knowledge.  Falsifiability was Popper's theory specifically of what "scientific method" consists of.  For a while it seemed like The Answer, but more recently I've seen there are competing philosophers of science saying that's not how the expansion of scientific knowledge really works.  That's an interesting topic in itself.  It looks like falsifiability as a ground of knowledge may be more honored in other fields of inquiry than at home in science.  Or was so at least when the Sosnowski piece was written, which seems to have been late 1980s.  Sosnowski may have more support from philosophy of science in seeking an alternative to the falsifiability model than he realized.

One more thought--it took me a while to make the connection of what about "feminist theory" he is invoking as a step forward.  I guess it has something to do with feminism's stance in opposition to heirarchical structures and models of society in favor of more cooperative approaches.  I remember reading something years ago which made this point, but can't recapture the name or writer.  It'll come to me eventually, I guess.