For Your Reading Pleasure
07 Mar 2011 4 Comments
I can’t post this on my regular blog but wanted to share . . .
It has NOTHING to do with Tiger Mother
This is an article that my tunnel-visioned, feminist professor had us read as we studied Frankenstein . . .
The author suggests that fiction is written for male pleasure because the plot structure resembles the male sexual experience (you know the little mountain drawing–rising action, climax, falling action). I’ll just share the 1st paragraph.
“I would like to begin with the proposition that female orgasm is unnecessary. I am not, of course, saying that it is unnecessary to any particular woman that she experience orgasm or, for that matter, to any particular man that his female partner do so; rather, I mean that women’s orgasm and, by extension, women’s pleasure can be extraneous to that culmination of heterosexual desire which is copulation. Women’s pleasure can take place outside, or independent of, the male sexual economy whose pulsations determine the dominant culture, its repressions, its taboos, and its narratives, as well as the ‘human sciences’ developed to explain them. Considering the last decade’s preoccupation with sexual difference and the pleasure of the text, it is surprising that theories concerned with the relation between narrative and pleasure have largely neglected to raise the issue of the difference between women’s and men’s reading pleasure.”
Mar 08, 2011 @ 04:28:41
Ugh! I could barely read that. Seriously I had to try so hard to get through it. But, uh . . . I’ve never thought that about fiction. I wish men would actually get MORE pleasure from reading fiction–then they’d read more, and the world would be a better place.
Why couldn’t you post this on your regular blog? (Ha. Just kidding).
I’m reading another book about China while I’m reading Tiger Mother. It’s about a man who teaches literature in China for two years (he’s in the Peace Corps). He’s a writer, but he had originally wanted to be an English professor. (Studied English at Princeton and Oxford!), but he couldn’t take all the criticism, criticism of criticism, et al that it took to be a lit academic in the United States. After reading your professor’s “take” on Frankenstein, I’d have to agree. I think I’ll stick with teaching basic writing at the local community college, where I get to teach my students to read for pleasure (not that kind of pleasure!), instead of putting my own agenda onto everything.
Mar 08, 2011 @ 05:26:49
You have an MA in English, right? Mostly I’m liking mine. But this professor is unbearable.
Actually the overly-emphasized feminism in all the classes is driving me crazy. I’d say 75% of the final papers that my classmates write for every class is some take on feminism. I don’t mind some feminist critique of literature but it’s not the end all of literature.
Did you encounter that in your studies?
And I laughed out loud when I read that paragraph–are you people serious? And then I read it to Ben and he shook his head in dismay.
Mar 08, 2011 @ 15:34:19
that paragraph made my head hurt, even though i am a mostly raving femi. oi.
Mar 13, 2011 @ 06:34:52
You’re not a raving femi. Though more liberal than me–I know, that’s like saying you’re drier than water–you just don’t qualify for raving femi.
1. I respect you and your opinions.
2. You haven’t lost your perspective or your marbles.
I could send you a bibliography of some of the awe(some/ful) stuff we’ve had to read this semester. These women are out to prove that they’re more liberal and crazy than the last generation of feminists. They’ve completely lost their political ideals–who cares about the vote, anyway–let’s just talk about how men (unfairly) have better sex than women. It’s all part of the patriarchal stifling under which we must toil as women.