여성의 시간, 차이의 공간: 페미니스트 문학비평과 탈주체
Women’s Time, Space of Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism as a Subjectless Critique
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This essay presents a brief historiography of contemporary feminist literary criticism from the perspective of subjectless critique. Believed to be centered around the core concept of female subjectivity, feminist literary criticism is supposed to address issues related with what it means to be a woman, to write as a woman, to be constantly aligned with collective traits of femininity. Nonetheless, the very category of woman has always been contested as it needs to be deconstructed in its essentialist assumptions and to be reconfigured in pursuit of multiplicity, singularity, irreducibility, and, most importantly, difference not just among women but rather within a subject. Such perpetual instability or impossibility of the category of woman, paradoxically enough, enables feminist discourses to remain open to re-negotiation with intersecting axes of subjectivity formation. This essay attempts to examine how the discourse of feminist literary criticism can be decentered through radical intervention with the linear temporality and ceaseless re-significations of feminine difference as well. The structure of the essay consists of the following components. First, feminist literary criticism is contextualized under the rubric of ’critique’ elaborated by Michel Foucault. Then, I revisit Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to tap into its audacious dismissal of binary gender definition and its nuanced proposal of subjectless writer. Next, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s formulation of literary inscription of feminist temporality, I discuss the ways in which sexual difference can be theorized in relation with subjectless state. The final thesis ’feminism which is not one’ is demonstrated with emphases on disidentifying process of becoming, which requires a critical distance from amenable storytelling of feminist history. The essay concludes with a brief illumination of political reverberations of subjectless critique in this increasingly post-critical times.
Abstract
This essay presents a brief historiography of contemporary feminist literary criticism from the perspective of subjectless critique. Believed to be centered around the core concept of female subjectivity, feminist literary criticism is supposed to address issues related with what it means to be a woman, to write as a woman, to be constantly aligned with collective traits of femininity. Nonetheless, the very category of woman has always been contested as it needs to be deconstructed in its essentialist assumptions and to be reconfigured in pursuit of multiplicity, singularity, irreducibility, and, most importantly, difference not just among women but rather within a subject. Such perpetual instability or impossibility of the category of woman, paradoxically enough, enables feminist discourses to remain open to re-negotiation with intersecting axes of subjectivity formation. This essay attempts to examine how the discourse of feminist literary criticism can be decentered through radical intervention with the linear temporality and ceaseless re-significations of feminine difference as well. The structure of the essay consists of the following components. First, feminist literary criticism is contextualized under the rubric of ’critique’ elaborated by Michel Foucault. Then, I revisit Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to tap into its audacious dismissal of binary gender definition and its nuanced proposal of subjectless writer. Next, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s formulation of literary inscription of feminist temporality, I discuss the ways in which sexual difference can be theorized in relation with subjectless state. The final thesis ’feminism which is not one’ is demonstrated with emphases on disidentifying process of becoming, which requires a critical distance from amenable storytelling of feminist history. The essay concludes with a brief illumination of political reverberations of subjectless critique in this increasingly post-critical times.
참고문헌 (37)
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