Myra Jehlen

Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism

Feminist thinking is really rethinking, an examination of the way certain assumptions about women and the female character enter into the fundamental assumptions that organize all our thinking. For instance, assumptions such as the one that makes intuition and reason opposite terms parallel to female and male may have axiomatic force in our culture, but they are precisely what feminists need to question-or be reduced to checking the arithmetic, when the issue lies in the calculus. Such radical skepticism is an ideal intellectual stance that can generate genuinely new understandings; that is, reconsideration of the relation between female and male can be a way to reconsider that between intuition and reason and ultimately between the whole set of such associated dichotomies: heart and head, nature and history. But it also creates unusual difficulties. Somewhat like Archimedes, who to lift the earth with his lever required someplace else on which to locate himself

Response to Peter Hulme

This business of reading, as Peter Hulme observes in his response, is not as easy as it looks. Harder still is paraphrasing what one has read; especially, by a perverse paradox, when one agrees with it almost completely. Expressing a marginal disagreement is the most delicate job of representation there is. I am grateful to Peter Hulme for his generous transcendence of the natural impulse to deplore all my misrepresentations, as he takes them to be, and I would like to begin by conceding one possible wrong impression. I should not have implied that the Bishop of Avilas dictum is actually discussed, much less explicitly endorsed in Colonial En-

The "Idea" of the New World in American Fiction@@@Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America@@@American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent

Introduction: One Man, One World 1. Starting with Columbus 2. The Mammoth Land 3. Necessary and Sufficient Acts 4. Plain and Fancy Fictions 5. Transgression and Transformation 6. The Rebirth of Tragedy Epilogue: After the Culmination Notes Works Cited Index

American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, and The Continent.

Introduction: One Man, One World 1. Starting with Columbus 2. The Mammoth Land 3. Necessary and Sufficient Acts 4. Plain and Fancy Fictions 5. Transgression and Transformation 6. The Rebirth of Tragedy Epilogue: After the Culmination Notes Works Cited Index