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suppression in the traditional patriarchal, or phallocratic, social systems. Feminist theory has therefore concerned itself as much with the significant silences that exclude women in male-authored texts as with the misogynistic representations or stereotyping of women in ancient male authors. Part of its goal will be to recover what few female voices, such as Sappho's, have managed to survive from the classical past, even though they have been misrepresented by the predominantly male values of the ancient and modern world. There are implications in this for canon formation, which according to feminist theory is to be seen not as the objective establishment of the best and the worst, but rather as a literary hierarchy determined by cultural, political and ideological considerations and not least by the unconscious desire to mimimize the role and importance of the female in society and in literature. An appreciation of this leads to the concept of a "feminist" reader who sceptically probes the underlying male assumptions and omissions in a given text, and the alternative readings possible the perspective of "gynocritics" (la gynocritique). Feminist theory however is not unified beyond its espousal of the most general goals, and it has, naturally enough, affinities to other sociological perspectives such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, including the Lacanian variety. Like them, it can focus on the genesis of the literary work and on its impact on the audience. Indeed some feminists have argued strongly for a pluralism of theory and practice, by contrast with the separatist strand of Lesbian theory. This last can invoke such classical sources as the works of Sappho and the recurrent motif of the Amazon in ancient and modern sources. Its implications are thought-provoking. It is provocative in that it calls into question the literary representation of sexual differences and gender and here it may be linked with similar investigations, notably those of Foucault, into the conceptualization of homoerotic love, with all the implications that has for the interpretation of certain classical texts.31 |
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These radical investigations in classical studies contrast strongly with the attempt by the New Right in the United States to appropriate most of the classical canon to its own political agenda. There have been similar attempts at such appropriation from the early Christian period through the Renaissance into the nineteenth century, when classical literature became the didactic instrument of "higher" spiritual, educational or counter-revolutionary purposes. Indeed even the supposedly value-neutral critical theories that concentrate on the intrinsic characteristics of literature are not immune to ideological analysis and political application. Religious, political, and even philosophical insistence that literature be part of a greater spiritual culture, and even at its service, is a call common to Platonic utopias, the requirements of the Inquisition and the Index librorum prohibitorum, as well |
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31 See Winkler (1990) 2 and Halperin (1990) 41. Both take as their starting point the work of Foucault. |
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