Textualizing the Feminine

Emphasizing image and metaphor as modes of representation, literary criticism often dismisses as perfunctory the work of grammar and punctuation. Western notions of cognition that equate knowing with seeing support the tendency to ready "beyond" details and interpret the whole message while ignoring the local elements and practices that enable its totalizing understanding. In other words, the interpretive models that guide our reading practices emphasize visual imagery but do not always take into account the spatial orderings or discursive practices that make possible this emphasis - including those that institute seemingly "natural" gender differences. Focusing on what gets lost in this process, "Textualizing the Feminine" addresses the question of how textual forms that escape or confound the privileged visual order of cognition figure in accounts of psychosexual subjectivity. Informed by feminist criticism and reinterpretations of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida, Shari Benstock examines the textual ordering of sexual difference in Jacques Derrida's "The Post Card", H.D.'s "Helen in Egypt", James Joyce's "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake", Sophocles' "Antigone", Gertrude Stein's "How to Write" and Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas".
Investigating conventions of punctuation, "marginalia" (eg footnotes), grammar, rhetoric, and letters (alphabets and genres) - textual elements that play seemingly tangential roles in representing subjectivity - she explains how the feminine is produced by cultural orderings of psychoanalytic processes.