White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography

Overview

The style of Nicole Ward Jouve's startlingly original appraisals of a broad range of women's writing suggests a new direction for feminist criticism, combining as it does challenging intellectual debate and fresh textual analysis with fictional example and autobiographical detail to make a wholly new intervention in the field. In addressing the need for the critic to say 'I' and to own judgements and statements instead of attributing these to an apparently impersonal third person, Nicole Ward Jouve points up some of the shortcomings of much prevailing 'feminist' analysis, challenging the very foundations of the Anglo-American feminist idea. Purposely avoiding the 'totalizing' effect of much academic criticism, the writer/critic finds a new format and a new methodology for her insights and observations on a range of writers, from Doris Lessing to Helene Cixous. Her unique analyses of the links between criticism and autobiography enable her to highlight the absurdity of attempting to write in the light of recent critical and scientific knowledge as if the self were a stable, unified construct, introducing instead a new, creative understanding of the methods and modes of women's writing. This sparkling collection presents an exciting and original new voice in literary criticism. Nicole Ward Jouve tackles issues fundamental to literary theory, feminist criticism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, offering new critical insights and providing a significant and wholly original feminist contribution to these key fields.

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