Examines the dilemmas of mid-career feminist professors, including: escalating demands on their time; pressures of work and family; high casualty rates among women hired; friction between generations and among feminists; and doubts about what professionalism means to the collective participants in the feminist venture. Discusses strains of this paradoxical combination of privilege and powerlessness for senior women within male-dominated institutions.

Suggests that the poetry and the life of Aphra Behn illumines the dynamic of a fascinating transitional period in definitions of gender and sexuality; and that she was the true pioneer of this brave new world of sexual possibility in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

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ror Has Two Faces-in class no less-with Jane Gallop's essay, Teacher's Breasts, and you find an apparent contradiction. The professor played by Barbra Streisand blithely lectures about sexuality and casually acknowledges students' awareness of her breasts, shown off in a low-cut black dress; Gallop, however, contends that teacher's create a conflict about the question of sex and, thus, the question of (84-85). In Gallop's view, teacher's display of authority makes male student more not less recalcitrant, and more not less in struggle for power (86). As usual, Gallop offers a startling interpretation: breast-singular, symbolic, and maternal-is precisely imaginary organ of nurturance, what good feminist teacher proffers to her daughterstudents. Refusing to nurture, . . . bad, sexual teacher brings into discourse of feminist pedagogy not breast, which is already appropriately there, but breasts (87). By mentioning her in plural, Streisand sexualizes literature classroom, exactly as camera does when it follows boys hurrying to class or pans intensely yearning students' faces. Streisand's movie demonstrates these cultural politics, showing how female teacher's sexuality has to be managed in order to avoid threat of sexual power struggle Gallop accurately predicts. What we see in Streisand is a version of Gallop's theory: maternal breast-safe and good-is opposed to more dangerous plural breasts, offered promiscuously to class's gaze. The erotics of literature classroom in Hollywood imagination comes as no surprise. Hollywood eventually misrepresents all professions, and all voca

Examines hundreds of compositions from 19th-century students at Mount Holyoke and other institutions. Finds that the first generation of women to attend United States colleges negotiated competing demands of service (to family and community) and of individual intellectual performance. Contrasts women’s compositions to men’s. Illustrates effects of gender on service, both as a concept and as an activity.

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I hese two books have very different stories to tell about the state of feminism in the American academy. The story told in Professing Feminism is already notorious beyond the academy; Gender and Academe will almost certainly never circulate so widely. Together, though, these books imply more than either does alone about how centrally academic feminism figures in current struggles over the nature of academic work and the policing of the academy's borders. Professing Feminism, according to its authors, is an inquiry... concentrated on feminism as it is practiced in Women's Studies at colleges and universities (xvii). Daphne Patai, a literary scholar, and Noretta Koertge, a historian of science, insist that their inquiry is an inside critique, aimed at calling academic feminism back from what they diagnose as its current ills to its liberal origins. We are feminists and.. . friends of feminism, they write in their Postscript, feminists arguing from within feminism about the means for achieving the basic goal of the liberation of women from all that impedes their ability to lead full and productive lives (218). Their methods of inquiry draw on the feminist models of ethnography and

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I he postmodern penchant for reflexivity has affected all arenas of social research, including composition and rhetoric.Sandra Harding explains the importance of reflexivity as she defines feminist methods: The beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research.This evidence . . .must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence....This kind of relationship between the researcher and the object of research is usually discussed under the heading of the "reflexivity of social science."(9) Reflexivity encourages a questioning of the most basic premises of one's discipline.Charles Bazerman, whose essay "The Interpretation of Disciplinary Writing" appears in Writing the Social Text, describes the fruits of interrogating one's discipline: "By reflection one can come to know the systems of which one is part and can act with greater self-conscious precision and flexibility to carry forward and, if appropriate, reshape the projects of one's discipline" (37).

ur Ptolemaic system of literary categories goes creaking and groaning onward, in spite of the widely acknowledged need overhaul it in response multiculturalism. This is not say that there have not been attempts revise course design in light of new materials and methods. For example, G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently (1985), Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson's Gender in the Classroom (1990), and James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion's Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) address the pedagogical consequences of deconstruction, feminist literary theory, and cultural studies, respectively, and also incorporate more diverse literatures. these attempts foster innovation in the individual classroom still leave the basic structure of English studies intact. In Kristin Ross's description of the multicultural world and cultural studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she comments indirectly on this problem when she identifies as one stumbling block the Santa Cruz program the faculty's unwillingness to depart from their specialized fields (668). They fended off demands diversify their course material with plaints like But I don't have a PhD in South African literature (668). Ross gives good reasons for forging ahead in spite of such protests, but she doesn't say much about the underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines, even though these are inimical the process of integrating new materials and methods because devised serve and protect the old ones.

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Critics have failed to account adequately for Ishmael Reed's recent fiction, and generally dismiss it as less interesting than his more controversial early writing. These recent novels seem more straightforward in their plots and messages, and much less experimental in method. I would like to suggest, however, that this apparent clarity is part of a complex and innovative style. We might characterize this style as in the broadest and most pervasive sense-that is, its overall narrative strategies at the level of plot, theme and character are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Reed broadens the definition of the rhetorical aspects of the literary text as part of a larger attempt to reformulate how his own works relate to the AfricanAmerican tradition. Critics have noted that African-American writers often are particularly aware of their precursors and tradition. Reed, however, not only carefully situates himself in relation to tradition in the abstract, but also anticipates in the novel's plot and structure the reactions of actual readers who share that tradition only in a problematic way. Indeed, in Reed's recent fiction this problematic reception of the work becomes the primary content of the novel. The implications of this move force us to reconsider how we are to trace the African-American tradition and to what degree that tradition can remain independent of the readings given it by mainstream American literary culture. I would like to explore such rhetorical workings in one particular recent novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Critics and reviewers unanimously agree that Ishmael Reed is assaulting feminism in Reckless Eyeballing. His protagonist, Ian Ball, is called a notorious sexist, and yet we are invited to suffer with Ball during his persecution at the hands of powerful women in the theatre world. When Reed climactically summarizes Ball's victimization by revealing him as two-headed, he seems to be using that common African-American trope of black double-consciousness. This trope defines black consciousness as split into two identities, one acceptable to and partially created by the white hegemony, the other more authentic but disturbing to that same mainstream society. But if we simply read the trope conventionally, we stumble straight into Reed's trap, and this is what critics

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As feminism has sought to contest patriarchy in ever more diverse sites of culture and increasingly to interrogate power/knowledge relations in a variety of disciplines, its languages have become more complex and difficult. This creates the paradox of a feminism much more capable of reunderstanding reality-and thus changing it-in profoundly different ways and yet much less accessible and understandable to those whose lives it seeks to affect. In other words, a widening gap is developing between the advanced languages and discourses of feminism-especially feminist theory-and its main constituency: those women (and men) who rely on its insights and the movement it articulates to orient their lives in more egalitarian and non-exploitative ways-in sexual relations, in raising children, in the politics of the work place and domestic arrangements. In fact, the difficulty of recent (postmodern) feminist theory has led many to reject it altogether as too remote and politically ineffective. But I believe that feminist theory is necessary for social change and that, rather than abandon it as too abstract, we need to reunderstand it in more social and political terms. I have thus attempted in this essay to rearticulate some of the main theoretical concepts of contemporary feminism in a more available language and, more important, to offer a political rewriting of these concepts. My text, therefore, is a series of explanatory speculations on feminist theory, its main concepts and the way these concepts enable a feminist rewriting of patriarchy. In doing so, it points to the emergence of what I call materialist feminist theory. In feminism, as elsewhere, postmodern has become a loaded and politically volatile word. Many feminists are opposed to it, worried that such a term may trivialize the serious import of feminism, which is intervention and social change. Underlying such mistrust is the common misunderstanding of postmodernism as a fad based on passing desires and trivial pursuits. This may be true of some aspects of postmodernism, but it is not at all characteristic of postmodernism in general; it is a significant political, cultural, and historical development. Teresa L. Ebert teaches critical theory and feminism at the State University of New York at Albany. She has completed a book on materialist feminism called Patriarchal Narratives and is at work on another on feminist theory and politics. In 1990 she organized and directed the conference on Rewriting the (Post)modern: (Post)colonialism/Feminism/Late Capitalism at the University of Utah where she was a Fellow in the Humanities Center.

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One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literary criticism is the periodization of literature for purposes of teaching, of analysis, and of specialization. These periods, created by a male-dominated literary establishment for a predominantly male literary tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, may be fictions, but they have the tenacity of convenience and convention. Even after feminist critics have worked successfully to recover neglected women writers and to place established women writers in the canon, the old periodization of literary studies holds firm. For example, when Modernism is stretched to include women and blacks, the new term High Modernists arises to relegate the additions to what presumably would be the status of Low Modernists. In reconsidering the question of periodization from a feminist perspective, the best place to start is with a major woman writer. For this purpose, Emily Dickinson is ideal because her writing life spanned literary periods and her poetry dominates the century in which she wrote. Generally credited as the greatest woman poet and a major influence on all subsequent women writers, Dickinson is nonetheless set in the literary period of American Transcendentalism, not as the jewel in its crown, but rather as a writer in the Emersonian and Romantic male tradition (see Homans and Diehl). Yet the genre in which she exclusively writes distinguishes her from the American Transcendentalists, and the attitudes she takes toward the lyric I, her art, and her audience are all quite different from theirs. In this statement, I draw no revolutionary conclusions: Dickinson is generally considered so far outside the main currents of the period that she is not always included in major studies of the time (see Matthiessen and Irwin). She does not fit in, I want to argue, because she belongs to a later period, and the reason she belongs to a later period is that she did not fit into her own. In this situation, she may be typical of many women writers who look forward to the next literary period-the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, for example, who has a certain Romantic strain in her poetry, or the Modernist Gertrude Stein, who exemplifies the experiments of Post-Modernism. My reasoning about Dickinson is not so circular as it might at first appear, and it is pertinent to the problems that women writers pose to periodization.

In past decade and a half, feminist critics-including Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter-have focused on Charlotte and Emily Bronte and their literary treatment of contemporary issues, especially their concern with women's education, women's employment, and women's identity during a period in which both law and custom gave women significantly fewer rights and privileges than men. Their younger sister, Anne, has not fared as well with either readers or critics, and consensus seems to be that she is not worth reading. Tom Winnifrith, for example, describes her as most obvious and crude of three sisters and as a moralist, not an artist: For in her views on marriage as in other spheres Anne Bronte is a much more blatant preacher of unorthodox attitudes than her sisters; she is also a much less good novelist and therefore gave reviewers less opportunity of softening their attacks on doctrines which she appeared to be thrusting down their throats. (116) Though feminist critics who have done so much to explore works of other Brontes have rarely given Anne more than passing notice, an earlier critic, Inga-Stina Eubank, devotes more attention to Anne and argues that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a feminist novel though not in the obvious sense. Contrasting Tenant to other nineteenth-century feminist novels, Eubank suggests that Anne may not always be in control of her feminist sentiments, for she does not focus her novel on question of married women's rights to control their own property, to enter universities, or to seek employment except in a few limited professions: And yet, through very nature of its central concern, this novel is feminist in deepest sense of word. Without any thought of what ought to be proper sphere of a woman writer, it analyses passion (and Helen even 'tells her love,' first to Huntingdon and then to Markham), exhibits profligacy and demonstrates vice, as demanded by its theme. (84) Almost a century and a half after pubication of Tenant, it is difficult to use external evidence to prove degree of Bronte's feminism, for-unlike Charlotte-Anne left few letters that clarify views expressed in her novels. How

In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:

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Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale presents its reader with an exercise in learning how to read for survival. The novel argues for a reading that combines emotional and intellectual perception and it demonstrates that without the combination of feeling and thinking, political meaning is lost. Atwood sets her novel in a future America, called Gilead. Pollution and war have resulted in a depletion of the white elite population and after a takeover of the government a stern religious patriarchy institutes a new regime dedicated to increasing the white population. Reproductive control always implies control of women, and Gilead first deprives the female population of all economic power and then divides them into five subjugated classes: Aunts, who do the dirty work of the revolution; Wives, who, past childbearing age, are married to the commanding elite; Econowives, women incapable of producing children, who marry the working classes; Marthas, servants of the Wives; and Handmaids, who have previously proven their ability to produce children and now are to do so for the elite Commanders. The futurist setting allows Atwood to invent words, reassign meanings, and explore the implications of a patriarchal language involved in creating an especially misogynist world. The three sections of the novel-the dedication, the tale itself, and the historical epilogue-combine to produce a text which comments on itself, on the act of authorship, and on the act of reading. Within the story itself, three narrative