Title: What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism? | Pen and the Pad
Headings: What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism?
What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism?
Historical Origins of the Movement
Challenges to the Literary Canon
Textual Analysis

Content: In fact, as Timothy H. Scherman, associate professor of English at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago has noted, "there are no 'rules'-no 'recipe'-­to doing feminist criticism." Challenges to the Literary Canon
One major approach to feminist literary criticism revolves around the desire to challenge or redefine the literary canon that has been dominated by men. In particular, as Scherman again notes, "feminist criticism makes space for and listens to women's voices previously muted or drowned out by dominant patriarchal literary-critical practices." In this sense, feminist literary criticism takes a particular stand against what the academic community has considered to be the norm for what it considers to be "literature." This critique of traditional scholarship is an approach that rejects traditional norms on the assumption that traditional literary analysis has a political and ethical agenda biased against women. For this reason, writers like Josephine Donovan hope to recapture the radical basis for feminist literary criticism by reinvigorating it with both the political and ethical components inherent in the inception of the movement. By exploring previously ignored writers and studying the women's literary tradition, critics hope to unveil previously held assumptions that marginalize the place of women in society. Textual Analysis
Another popular approach to feminist literary criticism is to examine closely what the text says, or as the case may be, does not say. In other words, what the text leaves out says much about the writer, literature in general, and society as a whole. By using this "hermeneutics of suspicion" literary critics hope to reveal how women are marginalized in the language of literature, according to Ady.