husserl's phenomenology

Perhaps this reviewer is getting crotchety but in addition to must have read he objects to the likes of writing politics meaning writing about politics. There is a useful distinction to retain between writing literature and writing about literature but writing women (women who write) now seem addicted to writing women to mean writing about women. The feminist agenda that is increasingly is dominating the US academy (and which threatens to be as oppressive as the male dominance once was) is telegraphed therefore in the book by Jocelyn Catty (now training a child psychologist, or psychologist for children). The book is called Writing Ra[e, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010, US $30.00) and appears in the series Early Modern Literature in History. She begins with definitions of rape, which can include (according to the preface to Gorboduc) illicit printing and which today has come to mean practically any affront. Feminists define unwanted touching even if not of prime sexual characteristics as «digital rape». Something more traditional was meant when the word was used by damsels sexually attacked in literature, both romances and the drama. Today extremist Andrea Dworkin has declared all male on female sex is rape. One might note that males can likewise be raped, be victims of lookism and other heinous offenses, and need protection too. This book, dealing in what the jargon calls «gender binarism», should one supposes have addressed rape of as well as by males just as it looks at literature written by both females and males (with their different angles and approaches). Rape should mean physical violence for sexual coercion of either sex. Women «reading and writing rage» ought to get their values and standards and language straight even when discussing the subject of «unacceptable behavior» in the works of minor writers such as Lady Lumley, Lady Worth, and others and «resistant reading» in an era of female speech «licensed and/or circumscribed». In Elizabethan England male speech was also censored. In the drama censorship was removed only within living memory. In fact almost all literature of any type in any age is controlled by the nature of the authors’ upbringing and the current laws and tastes of the society. No speech is completely free. It is always restricted only by the state of the language. Even Joyce or another distorting it has to start with language givens and operate within certain rules of the time and place. When those constraints were not, in the past, what the rules are today it is not of much use to complain. One hopes no costly reparations will be demanded for sins committed before this generation was born.