Feminism : Gayatri Spivak and Elaine Showalter.

Feminism : Gayatri Spivak and Elaine Showalter.

Hello readers!

Welcome to my blog. Here is my blog on Gayatri Spivak and Elaine Showalter's views on feminism. This blog is given by Professor Dilip Barad Sir.

Elaine Showalter ( 21 Jan. 1941)

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

         Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and Her most designed work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women's writing and in the portrayal of female characters in her writing.

        Elaine Showalter is an American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, which is a woman-centric to her literary analysis. The -female literary tradition which she analyses through three phases. 

Literary “subcultures”tend to pass through these stages:

 1) Imitation of the modes of the dominant tradition of the artistic.

2) Protest against these standards and values and a call for autonomy.

3) Self discovery is turning inward free from’ some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity.

            These three phases are very important to describe feminism in her words. She wrote many works in her life on feminism and feminine.

Gayatri Spivak ( 24 February 1942)

          Gayatri Spivak utilizes methods from Marxism, feminism and deconstruction, postmodernism and globalization.

          In a series of later essays Spivak urged women to become involved in deconstruction and to intervene in the evolution of deconstructive theory. She also urged her colleagues to focus on women’s historicity.

          Her most famous piece "Can the Subaltern Speak?". She gives the concept that silence can speak and give voice to other.She looks at the people who treated women in India and critique. She uses the concept of deconstruction. 

         In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:

1 ) The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : the way in which female readers changes sense of the text.

2 ) The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics : Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based on a feminine perspective.