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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Magali Cornier Michael, Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse. Post- World War I Fiction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. x + 275 pp. $21-95 paper.
It has been nearly fifteen years since Craig Owens wondered at "[t]he absence of discussions of sexual difference in writings about postmodernism."(1) In that time, a significant body of theoretical writing about gender and postmodernism, has appeared; I would cite work by Diane Elam, bell hooks, Linda Hutcheon, Biddy Martin, Chantal Mouffe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Patricia Waugh, and the contributors to Linda J. Nicholson's very useful collection Feminism/Postmodernism.(2) Yet for all this theorizing across various disciplines, there is still surprisingly little in the way of sustained "discussions of sexual difference in writings about" postmodernist fiction. The quick lists critics often use to sketch the field of postmodernist writing still tend to include the same seven or eight men--with, perhaps, the addition of Kathy Acker.(3) Only a handful of book-length studies of postmodernist fiction devote a significant amount of space to fiction written by women.
Magali Cornier Michael's Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse suggests that both postmodernism and feminism suffer from this oversight. Certainly, most current models of postmodernism based on the work of male writers are unable to find much possibility of affirmative political engagement among its many negational and disruptive strategies. However, the indifference is not exactly mutual, nor are its costs equal to the two parties. While most criticism about postmodernist fiction simply ignores women's writing, or at least its feminist implications, many feminist critics have been actively suspicious of (male) postmodernism. This suspicion may be self-defeating, for as Michael notes, "in practice the term postmodernism already is marked as a given" (13), already occupies a position of power on the cultural "high ground." There is therefore much to be gained--not only in terms of the range...
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