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Articulating Feminism:
An Interview with Rita Felski
Feminism is sometimes portrayed as opting for politics at the
expense of aesthetics; Rita Felski's recent Literature after Feminism
shows how, on the contrary, feminism has enriched the reading of
literature. Felski's books include Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist
Literature and Social Change (Harvard UP, 1989), The Gender of
Modernity (Harvard UP, 1995), and Doing Time: Feminist Theory
and Postmodern Culture (NYU P, 2000), a collection of her essays,
as well as Literature after Feminism (U of Chicago P, 2003). She
received her BA and PhD at Monash University and, beginning in
1987, taught at Murdoch University in Australia until 1994, when
she moved to University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English
and associate editor of New Literary History.
"This interview took place on 28 December in the Marriott at the
MLA Convention in Philadelphia, PA. It was conducted by Jeffrey J.
Williams, editor of this magazine, and transcribed by Srila Nayak,
editorial assistant for the journal while a PhD student in the Literary
and Cultural Studies program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Williams Your new book, Literature After Feminism, takes stock of
contemporary feminism, as I take it in the wake of the culture wars. Can
you talk about that book and the situation it answers?
Felski In Literature After Feminism I don't consider feminism as a whole;
I consider feminism as a form of literary criticism. It is not a book about
the way in which American feminism, or indeed feminism more generally,
has succeeded or failed. I'm really trying to present an assessment of
the pros and cons of what feminism has achieved as a mode of literary
interpretation.
The book was inspired by a sense of rage and frustration, more than
other things I had written. I wrote it quite quickly; I started it in about
2000, so that is relatively quick in my terms. At that time there was a great
deal of stuff in the media about how feminists were ruining the study of
literature, and it wasn't long after John Ellis's book, Literature Lost, had
come out. I was incredibly angry about these claims that were being widely
made: feminist critics were harpies who read literature only to excoriate the
sexism of authors, feminist critics had no interest in aesthetics and literary
qualities and style and form, they only read for content, they were only
interested in obsessing over the sexism of male writers. There were these
constant caricatures coming out in the media.
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Williams What year was it when you got your first job?
Felski 1987. I went to Perth and all the significant intellectuals there were
completely into poststructuralism. So I had a trial by fire where I had to
learn Derrida and Foucault, because all the first year undergraduates were
required to read Derrida and Foucault. I had to get up to scratch very
quickly. It was an incredibly high-powered, highly charged intellectual
atmosphere. A lot of great people were thereJohn Frow has gone on to
become a major figure, Bob Hodge is an important figure in semiotics.
On the other hand, it was also a key place for cultural studies, which
I also knew very little about at the time. A lot of students were interested
in pop culture. John Hartley was there, and so were many other cultural
studies people. So I got two new trainings, one in the history and theory
of cultural studies, the other in poststructuralism.
Then I moved again, to the University of Virginia, and I was exposed
for the first time to traditional and actually Leavisite ways of thinking
about literature that I hadn't really come across before.
Williams And there were people like Rorty there.
Felski Yeah, there was Rorty, there was New Literary History. Certainly
when I arrived in 93-94, it was still very much a traditional English
department, but there was this other set of things going on at Virginia too,
which was very exciting.
Williams You talk about your background in a couple of places, particularly
in the essay that was in PMLA called "Doing Time," about the lower
middle class. The great thing about that essay, I think, is that it revises the
standard paradigm of the set of classes and inserts this class between the
professional managerial class and the working class, that's neither working
class nor fully middle class either, in terms of salary and status. Anyway,
what is your background and how you think that it reflects on what you
do?
Felski I find it hard to talk about my personal biography. My parents were
from Eastern Europe. My father came from Poland and my mother came
from Czechoslovakia, and I grew up in Birmingham in England.
Williams What did they do?
Felski My father was a draftsman, my mother was a housewife. My father
died when I was fairly young. I was 14.1 am one of the grateful beneficiaries
of the welfare state. We were living on a basic widow's pension, probably
equivalent to $200 a week now, or maybe less. Thanks to a social system
that is now gradually being dismantled, I got free dental care and free
medical care, and I went to Cambridge on a full scholarship.
Williams As a final question, what you are working on now? You mentioned
a project called Tragic Women.
Felski I have two sets of interests at the moment. One relates to the state
of literary and cultural studies generally and addresses questions of
methodology and method. We have become infatuated with making big
political and theoretical claims about the world, but it seems to me, that we
often don't think in enough detail about how to justify the arguments we
make and the kind of evidence we use to substantiate them.
For example, I have been writing a fair amount lately about articulation
as a central part of the methodology of cultural studies, and as a method
that is fundamentally different from other politically motivated forms of
textual interpretation.
Williams How do you mean articulation?
Felski I mean articulation as developed by Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall,
Lawrence Grossberg, and others, as a way of conceptualizing how texts
may or may not relate to broader political frameworks. Take the model of
a train that has a locomotive at the front and a whole series of carriages
hooked up to it that can be replaced as necessary. This image crystallizes
the notion of articulation, as a process by which connections between
disparate phenomena are made, unmade, and remade. Articulation is thus
a way of conceptualizing how different elements of the social field may
come together to form temporary unities, without thinking of society as an
expressive totality whose entirety is reflected or crystallized in every one
of its parts. Many forms of political criticism work with the assumption
that doing a close reading of a particular work will generate miraculous
insights into a broader socio-political structure because that structure is
condensed within an individual work, a microcosm that leads out into the
macrocosm. Articulation rejects the idea that reading a grain of sand, as
Grossberg says, enables insights into a broad social world, and argues that
the meaning of the text can only be understood in relation to its changing
and variable articulations.
One of Hall's examples would be religion. Rather than saying
that religion is patriarchal or bourgeois, the claim is that religion has
no necessary meaning whatsover. It is articulated very differently as it
is hooked up to competing interests and different groupings. At certain
points specific articulations may be relatively stable, so it is not at all an
idea synonymous with complete freedom and dispersal, but it does include
a notion of contingency, so articulations can be unmade and remade quite
differently in specific contexts.
My point is simply that the methodology of cultural studies and
the Stuart Hall-Birmingham tradition has been closely tied to the idea of
articulation. That's precisely why close reading, in my view at least, is not
Felski Interview
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