For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts—above all, "objectivity"—seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life. Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume—including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim—respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior , Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass. Revealing the beliefs and formative life experiences that inform their essays, these writers characteristically recount the process by which their opinions took shape--a process as conducive to self-discovery as it is to critical insight. The result—which has been referred to as "personal writing," "experimental critical writing," or "intellectual autobiography"—maps a dramatic change in the direction of literary criticism. Contributors . Julia Balen, Dana Beckelman, Ellen Brown, Sandra M. Brown, Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton, Suzanne Bunkers, Peter Carlton, Brenda Daly, Victoria Ekanger, Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Shirley Nelson Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Melody Graulich, Gail Griffin, Dolan Hubbard, Kendall, Susan Koppelman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Linda Robertson, Carol Taylor, Jane Tompkins, Cheryl Torsney, Trace Yamamoto, Frances Murphy Zauhar " The Intimate Critique marks the coming out of a new critical genre, sure to generate controversy, pleasure, rage, support, disbelief, acclaim (i.e., strong reactions!) among its readers."—Alice Kaplan, author of French Lessons: A Memoir "Grouped together, these very different essays raise and respond to a question that feminist theorists continue to ask—about the extent to which individual experience and self-expression may be read as representative."—Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels "This book goes a long way toward breathing life into literary criticism, advancing the necessary effort to write about it in a personal, engaged, and interesting manner."—G. Douglas Atkins, University of Kansas "Grouped together, these very different essays raise and respond to a question that feminist theorists continue to ask--about the extent to which individual experience and self-expression may be read as representative."--Rachel M. Brownstein, author of "Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels" Diane P. Freedman, Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, is the author of An Alchemy of Genres: Cross-Genre Writing by American Women Poet Critics . Olivia Frey is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at St. Olaf College. Frances Murphy Zauhar is Assistant Professor of English at St. Vincent College. The Intimate Critique Autobiographical Literary Criticism By Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Frances Murphy Zauhar Duke University Press Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1292-5 Contents 1. Cover Page, 2. Title Page, 3. Copyright Page, 4. Acknowledgments, 5. Introduction, 6. Part I Muse-ings on Genre, Autobiography, Narrative: Formative Strategies, 7. Part II Critical Confessions, 8. Part III Autobiographical Literary Criticism, 9. Selected Bibliography, 10. Contributors, CHAPTER 1 Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint * * * Diane P. Freedman Throughout women's lives, the self is defined through social relationships; issues of fusion and merger of the self with others are significant, and ego and body boundaries remain flexible.—Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women" When a graduate student in English, I became fascinated by post-Freudian theories like those informing Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay. As a writer-critic, I could identify with Gardiner's notion that for women there is a "continual crossing of self and other." Because of this ego crossing or merging, Gardiner goes on, "women's writing may blur public and private and defy completion"; it resists tidy alignment with a single genre or realm of discourse. For women, borders—of ego, genre, discipline, geography—are made to be crossed (for warring men, too, though their deadly border wars that simply reaffirm and rearrange dividing lines among nations are not what most women writers seek). Many contemporary women writers want an intimacy with their readers and subjects as well as with themselves, for, as Susan Griffin puts it, "separated from our au