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Biljana Dojinovi-Nei, University of Belgrade 821.163.41.09

TEACHING FEMINIST

LITERARY THEORY: APOSTCARD FROM SERBIA

Abstract:In this text I summarize my experience in teaching feminist literary theo-ry. The basic idea is that teaching literature and literary theory, especially feminist liter-ary theory, is a process of personal development. This is why I compare my present experi-ence with the text from 12 years ago, describing the process of moving from impersonal topersonal approach in teaching.

Key words:feminist literary criticism, private, political, experience, teaching.

At the very opening of his book withan indicative title, After Theory, Terry Ea-gleton states that the golden age of cul-tural theory is long past. The critical ap-proach born out of the period 196580, haslost its sharp political end and socially ef-fective orientation, turning into the eldwhich creates a seamless continuity be-tween the intellect and everyday life (Ea-gleton 2003: 3). In the situation in which

intellectual matters are not any longer anivory tower aair, but of much more mun-dane quality which means that they re-join everyday life, there is a great risk oflosing the ability to critically rethink them.In other words, there is a danger of losingthe ideological distance and awarenesswithin the reasonably systematic reec-tion on our guiding assumptions, that is,theory as Eagleton broadly denes it. Ea-gletons view is that generations after path-breaking gures usually trade on the past.

As feminism has been seen as a pio-neering view in this theory of everyday life,its gendered segment, from my perspec-tive, there are two issues important for themethodology of teaching feminist literarytheory. The rst one is the issue of cultur-al/feminist theory vs. literary studies, andthe second one is the issue of trading onthe past.

Approach

One of the rst feminist slogans Ihave ever heard was private is political.Feminist criticism allowed and, actually,asked for, personal and private to be readout from and read into the literature. Read-ing has been understood as a process whichshapes our Weltanschauungwhich is, in-evitabely, ideologically, that is politicaly

coloured. Therefore, in order to explain theteaching process of feminist criticism Ihave gone through during the previous 18years in Serbia, I will stay as private/politi-cal as possible.

Twelve years ago I wrote a text entitledHow to teach feminist criticism: a person-al view and presented it at a BelgradeWomens Studies Centers Conference heldin October 1998 in Belgrade. I publishedthe Serbian version in springtime I re-

member that it was printed right beforethe NATO bombing of Serbia, which we allhave felt coming up even during the con-ference in October. I came back to the texttwo years ago, and found out that my expe-rience in the period of 19921998 diers atsome points greatly from what I have beenthrough in the last decade. At the sametime, I found myself inseparable from thatexperience, as a part of my own dure, the

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time that has been present for me all theseyears and have shaped my own presentteaching methods. Teaching methods? Myidentity, I meant to say.

In 1998, I wrote:

From impersonal to personal that couldbe the easiest way to describe the modications ofmy own approach to teaching. American feministliterary criticism was, in a way, an answer to for-mal criticism and its emphasis on impersonalityof the poet, his catalist-like position. As a studentof theory of literature, the most sacred notionsfor me were these of the autonomy of literatureand impersonality of a text. As a lecturer, I startedfrom the point of impersonality, wishing to repre-

sent and not to interpret (although I was quiteaware that my lectures were also a kind of inter-pretation), to hide my opinion all the way till theconcluding lecture. I had the strong reason forthat at the time: I needed to concentrate on factsand information, since the topic of my entirecourse had been actually unknown here. Only atthe end, when most of the major terms were ex-plained, did I feel free to give my own assesment.Of course, I tried to provoke students and makethem look from more angles to what was said,

with dierent results.

Even at these critical moments I tried tokeep my neutral position but in the comingschool years I decided to change the method ofteaching, and to be open about my attitude fromthe beginning, comment and agree or disagree. Ihave not changed that style of lecture so far, moreor less.

So, what do I make of this now, twelveyears later? The library of the BelgradeWomens Studies Center stores hundredsof books, including many classics of femi-nist theory, as well as the Centers ownpublishing production. In addition to that,there are digitalized texts on internet and,also, students travel, there are scholar-ships, opportunities to study abroad there is no longer the need to inform them.Everything important or, at least, basic,can be read in paper or on the screen. So,what is the role of the teacher now to pro-voke discussions, inspire?

Trading on the past

Do we in Serbia, teaching feministtheory, really trade on the past now? Do I?Had the path been broken already, back

then in the 90s when we started the femi-nist story? In a way, yes, because as neo-feminist ideas reached this region in themid-seventies, the cultural context wasthat of former Yugoslavia, a socialist coun-try consisting of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosniaand Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia andMontenegro. The most frequently men-tioned date in the history of contemporaryfeminism and feminist theory in Yugosla-via has been 1978, when an internationalmeeting, entitled Comrade/ss woman: anew approach to the womens issue, washeld in Belgrades Student Cultural Centre.

A survey of certain special issues ofmagazines of the time shows us that therst thematic sections on feminist literarycriticism and theory began to appeararound the beginning of the eighties1. If weadopt the controversial but useful dichoto-my of French feminist theory and Ang-lo-American feminist criticism, intro-duced by Toril Moi in 1985, it could be said

that, from the outset, the prevalent modein which feminist literary was representedin Yugoslavia, both in translations and au-thorial texts, was that of the French intel-lectual tradition.2

In 1986, in the literary magazine Knji-evnost(Literature), there appeared a the-matic section called Lecriture feminine,

1 Delo, Meseni asopis za teoriju, kritiku,poeziju i nove ideje, Nolit, Beograd, br. 4,1981, /temat: ena, znak, jezik/ thematic

block: Woman, sign, language/; Republika,Zagreb, studeniprosinac, 1983, br. 1112 /special issue.

2 There were, of course, texts on Angloamer-ican and even Nordic literary criticism, suchas Ljubia Rajis text Feminologija i knji-evnost na anglo-amerikom i skandinavs-kom podruju (Republika, Zagreb, stude-niprosinac, 1983, no. 1112, pp. 112131), butthe French approach was much more repre-sented in the period.

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which included texts, written for a confer-ence held in Dubrovnik3, by SvetlanaSlapak, Novica Mili, Nada Popovi-Perii, and Slobodanka Pekovi. Even 20

years on, this particular thematic sectionshould still be recommended reading forstudents of Womens Studies courses andespecially, in lecriture feminine. The sec-tion also oers interesting testimony con-cerning the extremely well-informed par-ticipants (also including one male partici-pant) from Belgrade (all working at theInstitute for Literature at the time) aboutthe topic which is still relatively unknownwithin academic circles.

Therefore, when the Womens Studies

appeared in Belgrade in 1992, with its rstcourses, the path had been already broken.The rst courses did not include literature.Soon, however, the literature became thestrongest part of the Centres program, butthe prevalent paradigm was somehowchanged. By the mid-nineties, genderedreadings became the prevalent mode infeminist criticism here. It is hard to datethe turning point or identify the texts thatwould mark this turn, but around mid-

nineties, the terms gender, feminist cri-tique and gynocriticism (the latter twotaking into account the division made byElaine Showalter), as well as anxiety of au-thorship, female gothic, etc., were all in-troduced to literary criticism in Serbia, 4

3 Knjievnost, Prosveta, Beograd, knj. LIIIsv. 89, 1986, /tema broja: ensko pismo (saskupa u Dubrovniku), str. 13861490/.Popovi-Perii, Nada, Filozofske pret-postavke drugog pisma , pp. 14211426; Sla-pak, Svetlana, Razgovor Hetere i Filosofa,pp. 14511458; Pekovi, Slobodanka, Alibi isamosvest, pp. 14581461; Mili, Novica,Nit pletivo,vorovi, beleke, pp. 14611471.

4 In addition to Lj. Rajis text, some relevanttranslations appeared in the eighties: thepart of the text by Elaine Showalter TheFeminist Critical Revolution, translated byBiljana Dojinovi,Znak, Beograd, 1986, br.20, pp. 3035; and Roman Seldens textFeminist Criticism, translated by SneanaNei, Knjievna re, Beograd, april 1989, br.342, pp. 1819.

That is, at the very moment when the cul-tural and geopolitical space has already be-come narrowed the country is not social-ist Yugoslavia (the SFRJ) any longer, but a

Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and Monte-negro. The war and the disintegration ofthe SFRJ did not, in general, cut the con-nections between womens groups oramong particular women writers and crit-ics. However, the stamp of trauma and lifein isolation was inevitably imprinted. Itmay be that the traces of war are less ap-parent in literary criticism and theory thanin sociology or anthropology, but they werenevertheless present, not least via the con-temporary literary texts of the time.

Seen in this context, it seems thatgendered readings oered the othersviewnot only of literature, but of reality, too.The elements that had been considered ir-relevant to a text itself, through the notionof gender, became important for under-standing it. Gender-based readings haveimmediately turned towards (mostly con-temporary) womens literary production,thus evading the phase of feminist analy-ses of male texts which examine stereo-types of women and misogyny (Slapak

1997: 14). Both readings of womens literaryproduction and the sporadic discussions ofmens work have been carried out mostlyin a manner closer to the ideologicallyneutralgender theory.

The moment at which genderingsbloomed was marked by the formation ofthe Belgrade Womens Studies Centre(1992), as well as by the inception of a num-ber of feminist magazines. Amongst theearliest of these were SOS bilten(SOS Bul-

letin1993) which was renamed Feministi

kesveske(Feminist notebooks) a magazinemostly devoted to activism, and partiallyto theory, followed in 1995 by two maga-

The rst book on American approach waspublished in 1993: Biljana Dojinovi-Nei,Ginokritika: Rod i prouavanje knjievnostikoju su pisale ene(Gynocriticism: Genderand Research of Womens Writing), BeogradKnjievno drutvo Sveti Sava.

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zines of feminist theory. The rst one wasProFemina,magazin za ensku knjievnosti kulturu, subtitled as a journal in womensliterature and culture, then enske studije,

asopis za feministi

ku teoriju (WomensStudies, a Journal in Feminist Theory),which was renamed Genero in 2002, andthese two have survived till now,ProFemi-napublishing recently its 50th issue. Thismeant that the space for feminist theory,including feminist literary criticism, hadnally been opened.

Teaching

Every theory is, in a way, a kind of au-tobiography. Interepreted, taught, it be-comes a kind of oral history. And this is onething feminists do know how to do. Theshift in understanding theory actually en-abled us to do so. Therefore, makinggrounds and developing the eld markedfor me the rst years of teaching feministliterary criticism. There were founders inanother culture and language and, also,founders or, at least, the academic path-breakers, at home too, but the path had notbeen broken yet in that private/political

sense. Not for me, at least. The politicalcontext in the 90s degraded our lives andthe ideas of emancipation kept the lights ofdignity turned on for us and our students.

What did we struggle with in ourclassrooms? With the ideas of isolation, ofthe dangerous machoism in reading cul-ture and history in order to support isola-tion and irrational self-praise, disintegrat-ing the country we lived in and turning itspieces into patriarchal u/topoi, into night-marish reality. History seemed to serve

very well for the political rhetoric, and it isinteresting how womens literature had itsown way of talking back to it.

Examples of specic cultural signi-cation in Serbian womens writing can befound at the end of the 1990s, when a num-ber of women writers made use of histori-cal male gures as literary characters, pre-senting them from the perspective of theirprivate lives. In a brief period from 1995 to

1998, three texts written by three promi-nent women writers appeared on the Ser-bian literary scene, dealing with, as centralor episodic characters, historical male g-ures, icons of Serbian history and culture.They are the novels Bezdno (BottomlessPit, or Abyss) by Svetlana Velmar Jankovi(1995) and Poslednji zanosi MSS (The LastFascinations of MSS) by Milica Mii-Dimovska (1996), as well as a story entitledOnaj drugi to eka u tamnoj noi (TheOther One Who Waits in the Dark Night),which concludes Ljubica Arsis collectionCipelebuvine boje (The Shoes of the FleaColor, 1998).5

During the time when history was his

story of great deaths and deeds constantlyretold for the purpose of justifying nation-al identity, these women writers used thediscarded, neglected, hidden, and margin-alised material of private lives to weave acompletely dierent picture. In such con-text it was impossible to dig into a text inan unpolitical way. There was no possibili-ty to stay neutral, neither in writing, norin teaching about literature. Questionsconcerning our reality were provoked bysuch texts, and the issues of literature andhistory reviewed from new perspective.Literature seemed to set history free fromthe burden of the ideological task, put onit in present times. Womens literature ofthe period pointed to the misuse of histo-ry, and it was enough to put historicaltexts, literary texts and mass-media com-ments side by side to stage the drama ofthe ideological interests which was mark-ing our lives outside the classroom.

But, some time before I became awareof this literature history relation I had a

personal experience which in

uenced myteaching methodology, too. As I tried toexplain it in the text from 1998:

5 Svetlana Velmar Jankovi received the NINprize, for Bezdno Milica Mii-Dimovskasnovel was awarded Nolits prize and prizesBranko opi and Bora Stankovi. Ljubi-ca Arsiwas Given the ProFeminaaward forthe manuscript of the collection Cipelebuvine bojein 1998.

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In the atmosphere of growing interest forwomens studies, highly positive changes in theattitudes of students (each generation seems tobe more open and more ready to take an activepart) I came to a personal experience which made

me make a turn in outlining the program. Afterbecoming mother, obligations expanded and thetime for lecturing and preparing lectures short-ened. My strategy was to start from the experi-ence, accepting it and putting it into theoreticalframe, instead of trying to stay impersonal anddistanced from the eld of science. The idea ofthe course on motherhood and literature has ac-tually chosen me, as Adrienne Rich put it at thebeginning of her famous book.

And, as for the lectures ... for the rst time Ifelt I was speaking not only from the theoreticalbut also from the deeply personal point of view,from my female experience...

I cannot help but smile at the enthusi-asm these lines expressed. I rememberedthem vaguely two years ago, when I wastalking about reading out history fromwomens texts, and took an excerpt fromDoris Lessings The Summer Before theDark. There is a scene in this novel, a vi-gnette, actually, in which an older womanrecognizes the frustration of a youngmother in just one glance. I pointed to the

scene as one of those places which counton private history in provoking emotionalreading. We spot some scenes in accor-dance with our personal history and markthem as important and deeply emotionalsigns without almost any intellectual ef-fort. These spots are points at which inter-pretation comes closest to life itself, to theemotions of pain or happiness in everydaymeaning. These places where we read out(or read in) without intellectual recogni-tion are dierent for dierent readers, de-

pending on their own experience, but thecommon denominator is that a reader doesnot think much about it, they just react toit. Such places I call engramic.

However, some other dilemmas be-came more important for me back then in1999, just after my text was published. Howdo you raise children, how are you sup-posed to read, think, lecture feminist liter-ary criticism under the bombs? The NATO

bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999made our feminist theory classroms emptyfor a while. If criticism is political, and po-litical is private, how do we teach literature

under the bombs? What do you read be-tween two air raids? How do you explainvalues of ambiguity, irony, impossibility oftruth, under the bombs? How does oneteach about humanity while being mal-treated in the name of it? The violent cli-max of 1999 came after the decade of de-grading struggle, making me silent andpolitical only in my privacy. I wanted to beleft alone, could not even read during thesethree months. It made the engramic expe-rience of fear, pain and rage in me the

emotions which I will always recognizeand react to in life, and also when exposedto their corellatives in literature and art.After the spring of 1999 I made a turn to-wards women writers as predecessors, andfound out many women who suered mis-understandings, survived wars and evenmanaged to develop their own theories

Narration

If in the rst period of my teaching

feminist theory I wanted simply to informthe students and simultaneously keep myopinion away from them for a while, in or-der not to disturb their process of under-standing the material presented, ten yearslater I do not have any other ambitions butto tell stories. Just like those postcards con-sisting of more photos connected by thebright letters of a citys name, I want to giveonly basic directions about a topic. On theother side is my own, personal story of acity what has happened to me there, how

I see it, what is my own personal/political/poetical experience of it.Narrating theory as a story is not an

easy task, but for me it is the only way tomake it trustworthy and memorable. Thetask of a theory teacher is partially the taskof a translator there are other peoplesdiscourses which she should translate intoa coherent story for others. The perfect ex-ample for this could be a discourse on A

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Room of Ones Own in almost any feministtheoretical text discussing the category ofgender. It is up to the teacher (in the role ofthe interpereter) to enliven the dialogue

of the author6

with this iconical text andpresent it as a process. Why not just simplytake the theoretical consequences and dis-cuss it in a less dramatic way? Because, ifpolitical and poetical are private, then itmeans that we have to bring back to lifethis connection in the classroom, to stageit again for the new generations which, forinstance, may not be aware of what itmeant to discover that our bodies, ouranatomy, did not really determine ourlives. It has to become an engramic experi-

ence, and only literature makes it possible.Why is agure (of speech), a trope (whichmeans a turn) employed at every impor-tant turn in a theoretical text? Take, for in-stance, the guration of a nomad in RosiBraidottisNomadic Subjects. Or, the usageof Margaret Atwoods novel in a text aboutfeminist philosophy and globalization7.Using a literary work as illustration in aphilosophical text is metaphorization of aproblem. Once done, it falls (or rises) be-

yond abstract language and opens towardmultiple meanings.

Teaching about literature in feministways and about feminist literary theorythus becomes the school of life, in the wayIsadora Duncan said about dancing -Todance is to live, what I want is a school oflife. As a matter of fact, there were mo-ments when I asked my students to per-

6 Take, for instance, the chapter on V. Woolfin Elaine Showalters book A Literature of

Their Own, the reading of this chapter inToril Mois Sexual/Textual Politics.7 Jennifer Eagan from California State Uni-

versity in the text The Feminist Desire for aPrimordial Place, Or Why Feminist Philoso-phers Avoid the Issue of Globalization,pub-lished in 2005 in the internet journal Global-ization, writes about Margaret Atwoodsnovel Surfacing pointing that the struggleagainst homogenization is deeply connected

with the struggle for ones identity.

form the very rst lecture Isadora gave indancing making wave like motions witharms. Just to remind them what rhythm isand how our bodies think.

P.S. on the postcard

It may seem that feminist literary the-ory takes us away from the literary quali-ties of a work of art, but it is so only if weconsider them severly separated from lifeitself. The very issues of power, hegemony,the body, sexuality, ecology, producingand/or rethinking the key words and con-cepts such as gender, pleasure, desire, mar-ginality, periphery tell us that feminist

theory is an important part of the theoryof everything in human life, which refers toour complete experience. Feminist literarytheory teaches us to understand and assessthe place and meaning of ideology in ourlives, and ideology is a set of beliefs andideas that permeate and inuence our ev-eryday decisions and appear as, or are hid-den behind, certain means of representa-tion in the society and works of literature.To make these mechanisms visible andveritable we need to turn to our own expe-

rience and refer to other peoples experi-ence. It is the privilege of literature andliterary theory teachers to combine andplay with images and concepts in their dis-course, but it is the privilege of teachers offeminist literary theory to give this gamethe body of their own experience in orderto make it engramic for others. Exercisingthis right has made the postcard from Bel-grade so mosaic-like.

Bibliography1. Atwood, Margaret (2003), Surfacing.

London: Virago Press.2. Delo,Meseni asopis za teoriju, kriti-

ku, poeziju i nove ideje, Nolit,Beograd,br. 4, 1981, /temat: ena, znak, jezik/topic of the issue: Woman, sign, lan-guage/; Republika, Zagreb, studeniprosinac, 1983, br. 1112 /special issue.

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3. Dojinovi-Nei, Biljana (1993), Gi-nokritika: Rod i prouavanje knjie-vnosti koju su pisale ene, Beograd:Knjievno drutvo Sveti Sava.

4. Dojinovi-Nei, Biljana (1998), Howto teach feminist criticism: a personalview, conference paper, manuscript inEnglish.

5. Dojinovi-Nei, Biljana (1999), Kakopredavati feministiku kritiku: linoiskustvo, Kreativno vaspitanje, Beo-grad: broj 4, 1. mart 1999, str. 2530.

6. Knjievnost, Prosveta, Beograd, knj.LIII sv. 89, 1986, /focus of the is-sue: ensko pismo (sa skupa u Du-brovniku/Womens Writing, Confer-

ence in Dubrovnik), pp. 13861490/.7. Eagan, Jennifer (2005), The Feminist

Desire for a Primordial Place, or WhyFeminist Philosophers Avoid the Issueof Globalization,Globalization 5 (2).http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v5.2/eagan.html

8. Eagleton, Terry (2003), After Theory,New York: Basic Books.

9. Mili, Novica (1986), Nit pletivo,

vorovi, beleke, Knjievnost, 89, pp.14611471.

10. Pekovi, Slobodanka (1986), Alibi i sa-mosvest, Knjievnost, 89, pp.

14581461.11. Popovi-Perii, Nada (1986), Filozof-ske pretpostavke drugog pisma, uKnjievnost, 89, pp. 14211426.

12. Raji, Ljubia (1983), Feminologija iknjievnost na anglo-amerikom iskandinavskom podruju, in Repub-lika, Zagreb, studeniprosinac, no.1112, pp. 112131.

13. Selden, Raman (1989), Feministikakritika, translated by Sneana Nei,Knjievna re, Beograd, April 1989, no.

342, pp. 1819.14. Showalter, Elaine (1986), The Femi-nist Critical Revolution, translated byBiljana Dojinovi, Znak, Beograd,1986, nr. 20, pp. 3035.

15. Slapak, Svetlana (1997), Women WhoSteal the Language, in ProFemina,Special Issue.

16. Slapak, Svetlana (1986), RazgovorHetere i Filosofa, Knjievnost, 89,1986, pp. 14511458.

PREDAVATI FEMINISTIKE KNJIEVNE TEORIJE

Rezime

U tekstu rezimiram iskustvo u predavanju feministike knjiev-ne teorije. Osnovna ideja jeste da je, osim to je teorija autobio-graja, pisanje i govor o sebi, i proces predavanja knjievne teo-rije lini proces samorazvoja. Uporeujui tekst napisan pre 12godina i sadanji odnos prema pitanjima javnog i privatnog, im-personalnog i linog u knjievnosti, zakljuujem da je lino

iskustvo bitan inilac odabira ne samo teorijskog nego i meto-dolokog pristupa. Naglasak na linom iskustvu je u samimosnovama feministike kritike, ali upravo se taj njen aspekt nemoe nauiti, vese mora doiveti da bi se razumeo. U teorij-skom smislu, tu je reo engramskom doivljaju knjievnog tek-sta susretu dubokog, vie ne i nuno svesnog linog doivljajai njegovog knjievnog korelativa.

biljanadn@gmail.com