"Response to "The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms

T IS HARD to be sympathetic with Ellen Messer-Davidow's arguments for a more contextual and theoretically self-reflective kind of literary and cultural studies. The academic study of the humanities that is frequently invoked by current educational conservatives has never really worked effectively, even in the eyes of most earlier traditionalists. The current notion that in the 1960s the academic humanities underwent an abrupt falling away from a previous state of humanistic integrity and coherence rests on a fanciful rewriting of history, though one that is useful for making scapegoats of literary theorists. Having had disagreements with some literary theorists, I have become accustomed to seeing myself praised or attacked for being antitheory. But criticizing particular theories should be confused with opposition to theory. In my view, it is theory, but the systematic neglect of it, resulting in the stranding of students without a context, that has created most of the perennial and still current problems in the teaching of the humanities-certainly more than any regression from a supposed state of traditional humanism. The educational incoherence about which conservatives justifiably complain is only another term for a poverty of theoretical discussion and debate. I also find attractive Messer-Davidow's suggestion that the subject of feminist literary criticism is not literature but the feminist study of ideas about sex and gender that people express in literary and critical media. If I understand her point correctly, it is that the proper concern of feminist criticism is with texts but contexts, with the gender aspect of literary works considered as distinct entities, but with the construction of gender by literary and critical discourses. Such a conception would correspond accurately with the direction of the feminist critical work Messer-Davidow surveys in her essay. Though she does quite put it in these terms, then, MesserDavidow seems to me to have presented a defense of the current trend toward in literary and humanistic studies. More specifically, her case is for those forms of theory that seek to historicize and contextualize the disciplines, to make them reflective about the

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