In "Reading as a Woman" Jonathan Culler
describes three directions in feminist literary criticism.
The first direction holds that women's life
experience extends into their reading of literature. This means that their experience
as a woman is the source of authority to the "reader response" of
feminine reading. This attitude means the women read differently from man,
making the text a non-neutral ground as traditional literary criticism would
have us thinking. Such criticism, says Culler, will mostly deal with themes in
dominant literature. They will criticize male dominant literature and expose
masculine bias.
The second direction Culler describes in "Reading
as a Woman" holds the woman are conditioned to read as man. This view
holds that masculine reading should be opposed by the establishment of a
feminine reading (which is not given, like in the first approach Culler
describes). In this sense reading as a woman means not reading as a man. This obviously
maintains the binary opposition between men and women and only tries to shift
the balance.
The third trend Culler describes is the
post-structural approach which argues that the concepts, categories and
distinctions employed in literary criticism are masculine (and this includes
the two former trends). The attempt here is to deconstruct the distinction
between masculine and feminine reading.
Culler's position at the end of "Reading as a
Woman" is that the feminine experience has a double position. On the one
hand Culler holds the being a woman is a precondition to reading as a woman. On
the other hand this position must be constructed and established. This is sort
of a middle ground between the different positions described in Culler's
article. It is not an essentialist position but still one which appeals to a
reality outside of theory.