BAE 115 Literary Theory Assignment 3

Submitted to Dr. Gurpyari Bhatnagar Ma’am

Submitted by Sonal Saloi (2019577116) BA (Hons.) English 4th Sem

Question.

Write on the following Important definitions and concepts.

1. Ecriture féminine
2. Gynocriticism

Answer.

1. Ecriture féminine :

Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist
Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a
genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which
examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body
and female difference in language and text.

Ecriture feminine refers to a uniquely feminine style of writing characterised by disruptions in the
text, such as gaps, silences, puns, new images and so on. It is eccentric, incomprehensible and
inconsistent, and the difficulty to understand it is attributed to centuries of suppression of the
female voice, which now speaks in a borrowed language. Believed to originate from the mother
in the stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centred verbal
language, this pre-linguistic and unconscious potentiality manifests itself in those literary texts
which, abolishing all repressions, undermine and subvert all significations, the logic and the
closure of the phallocentric language, and opens into a joyous freeplay of meanings.

The approach through language to feminist action has been criticised by some as
over-theoretical: they would see the fact that the very first meeting of a handful of would-be
feminist activists in 1970 only managed to launch an acrimonious theoretical debate as marking
the situation as typically 'French' in its apparent insistence on the primacy of theory over politics.
Further criticisms of écriture féminine include what some claim is an essentialist view of the
body and the consequential reliance on a feminism of 'difference' which, according to Diana
Holmes, for instance, tends to "demonize masculinity as the repository of all that (at least from a
post-'68, broadly Left perspective) is negative. It also, says Holmes in French Women's
Writings, 1848-1994 (1996), would exclude much of women's writing from the feminist canon.

2. Gynocriticism :

Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined in the seventies by Elaine Showalter to describe
a new literary project intended to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature". By expanding the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition,
gynocritics sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace
male models of literary creation, and so "map the territory" left unexplored in earlier literary
criticisms.

While previous figures like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir had already begun to review
and evaluate the female image in literature, and second-wave feminism had explored
phallocentrism and sexism through a female reading of male authors, gynocriticism was
designed as a "second phase" in feminist criticism – turning to a focus on, and interrogation of
female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and
development of the female literary tradition.

Gynocriticism helped reclaim from obscurity a vast body of early female writings, often published
in Virago, as well as producing such feminist classics as The Madwoman in the Attic. However
its very successes left it open to new challenges from within feminism. Poststructuralists
complained that it fetishized the role of the author, at the expense of the reader and the text,
and that its grand narrative, setting up a female canon in opposition to the male, was
essentialist, and omitted differences and divisions among women, leaving out lesbians and
women of color, for example.

Race, class, social interest, political inclination, religion and sexuality[3][5] all arguably come
into play in the construction of identity. Separating out such properties would create a
one-dimensional view of the female, yet if gender and identity are merely constructs then it
becomes difficult to assign any inherent qualities of nature or language to found a critique.

Despite such limitations, gynocriticism offers a valuable interrogation of 'female' literature,

through the study of sameness and difference in gender.[5] While the term is rarely used in
third-wave feminism, the practices and canon establishment of gynocriticism continues to
underpin feminist literary criticism.