Annette Kolodny seems to be a voice of post modernism as well as feminism. She implies that we approach reading by the way we are taught. We are molded by different social constructions and learn to read with those constructions forming our thoughts. The introduction says that "Literary criticism matters to feminists because they insist that literature embodies social beliefs, conventions, attitudes, ad ideologies that operate powerfully throughtout the whole of society" (2145). If we apply this to Cixous, it makes sense to say that literature has been phallocentric because that has been the culture surrounding literature throughout history.



She talks about women's writing which tries to circumnavigate language culturally instituted by males. Women use their own language in writing and give it new symbollic meaning in order to escape the political and cultural associations with traditionally male language. The problem then becomes men's interpretations of that language (or lack of interpretation). They cannot decipher the language and so they disregard it as meaningless. This in sorts presents a catch-22: in order for women to communicate and for men to appreciate their writing women must use their language, but by using men's language women are still playing into the male literary constructions.



Kolodny tells a story of one of her colleagues who denounced Kate Chopin as an author worth reading. "'If Kate Chopin were really worth reading,' . . . 'she'd have lasted - like Shakespeare.'" (2152). This made me think of Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's Sister." Maybe if Shakespeare's sister had actually been educated and possessed the same talent as her brother and had been allowed to write, Kate Chopin would also possess that same lasting quality. (I think today she does because we read The Awakening in my American Lit. class). It's absurd to think that a book so highly acclaimed today was only a few decades ago still looked at as something inferior just because of its womanish language.