The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender

by Barbara Johnson

Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passé, feminism today seems becalmed without being calm. This is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture--yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In fresh readings of a wide array of texts--legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical--renowned literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point. Employing surprising juxtapositions, The Feminist Difference looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective; at poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's rich, stimulating, unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--moments that re-emerge here as sources of a revitalized critical awareness. In the final analysis, Johnson argues, literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book literature appears not as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.

Genres: Feminism, Theory, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Feminist Theory

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 27, 1998

About the author

Librarian note: There are other authors with the same name

Barbara Johnson was an American literary critic and translator. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara...

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like previous essay collections by Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference examines and uncovers issues of race, gender, and authorship itself in fiction and poetry. In simplest form, her method is to find inner conflicts in a specific work, and use them to discover how's the author's identity is also complex and conflicted.

In my favorite essay, Johnson describes the poetry of an 18th century slave who become a teenage poetry prodigy. Taken from West Africa at the age of seven, she was writing publishable poetry by 14. Writing before and during the Revolutionary War period, Phillis Wheatley's New England masters even got a book of her poems published, and she was eventually freed. Johnson talks about a poem of hers that decried the tyranny of the English, and stoked the fires of rebellion. The poem, the name of which I've now forgotten, was written while the author was still a slave, and seems to modern ears to be a bitter joke. Her masters loved the poem and didn't seem to see the irony, and had it published in a newspaper. Johnson discusses how modern black writers tend to view the poems as acts of submission instead of the carefully calculated acts of what Johnson calls 'excessive compliance.'

My favorite part of which is the juxtaposition of two poems, one on the Stamp Act, and the other giving thanks for having been 'saved' from Africa. This is the ending line of the Stamp Act poem:

"And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch's smile can set his subjects free!"

and then on the opposite page you have this:

"'TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither fought now knew,"


* I reread some of these essays last week, and have bumped my rating up to 4 stars. Some of them are difficult but payoff with multiple readings.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never though close reading can be this fun! ha. I can do this to my sutras! My favorite phrase: the profoundly political nature of the inescapability of aesthetics of the personal, political, and social life.
Well, kidding. sometimes the sentences are so complicated that I have to read it two or three times and still not getting what it means. when that happens, I skip. If you read it this way, it's an awesome book. It points out quite a few hidden subtle structures of thinking that will otherwise remain hidden and control our thinking from the background forever.
A smartly written book!

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, yes, yes. This book is amazing.