Seeking a Playful Pluralism

We didn't get to Kolodny's article last week, but I've always admired the gracious and open kind of orientation she espouses and seeks. The feminist, she asserts, claims "her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts" (164) -- far from presuming any degree of "definitiveness" or "structural completeness" (164), she invites us instead into "a dialectical process of examining, testing, even trying out the contexts," in the process "[initiating] nothing less than a playful pluralism, responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none" (165). This reminds me a little bit of the final moments of our discussion of Derrida and the process of bricolage, when we proposed that deconstruction doesn't have to be merely destructive (or, worse, nihilistic), but can be celebrated as a way of inspiring creativity and originality by finding news ways of putting elements together.

We only just got started on those five poems, which I distributed with an eye towards providing examples for Showalter's "feminist critique" (via Heaney's "Act of Union" and Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day') and "gynocriticism" (via Gluck's "Mock Orange," ni Dhomhnaill's "We are Damned, My Sisters," and Boland's "What We Lost"). As we finished our time this past Thursday, we had only just started talking about "Mock Orange," which I was trying to propose represents the erotic object -- previously silenced, paralyzed, simplified (see the Shakespeare poem for the model) -- becoming the subject and being given a voice. We might also wonder about the role of nature in this poem, and how it is aligned with a gynocritical sensibility. Anyway, all to say, perhaps some of you might be inclined to comment in this space on this poem, and/or one of the others ("We are Damned"? "What We Lost"?). In what ways do these poems help us to realize Showalter's appeal that we focus on "the newly visible world of female culture" (149)? Do they counteract the tendency of feminist critique "to naturalize women's victimisation" (148), and, if so, in what ways?