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IN THE SPRING SEMESTER OF 1978 I taught a seminar on contemporary women's fiction to twelve women graduate students. Taught is really the wrong word. Officially, I was responsible for the course, for grades, for leading discussion; actually it was that rare experience, a class that ran itself. This was partly because the students had designed the course-a course in which some of their own unpublished work would be discussed in the same way as already published fiction-and therefore felt responsible for it. But it was also because a real sense of community developed as our established critical methods failed us and we groped towards formulating new ones. The words with which one of the students, Marilyn Johnson, introduced her project for the course suggest the atmosphere that developed: