In her article, published six after the book, Warhol acknowledges that she now had to qualify this argument because her book had implicitly and unconsciously taken white-authored texts to be narrative norms that could be universally applied. In the years between 1989 and 1995, literary criticism’s discovery and embrace of a of difference” had made plain the error of that “politics assumption. In her article, therefore, Warhol proposed to use the model” of a “binary gendered distinction between male distancing and female engaging narrators not to it as a universal or absolute but quite the opposite to show how a text like “fix” – Jacobs’s Incidents both deployed, evaded, and improvised on it. Jacobs, she went on to show, uses both kinds of narrator in her text. Sometimes her narrator is engaging and seeks to make common cause with readers, but at other times the narrator states unequivocally that her readers will never really understand her as when she – writes, can you imagine? No, you cannot.” Warhol put the case more “Reader, precisely by referring to the relation between Jacobs’s narrator and her book’s narratee (implied reader): narrator draws a line which the narratee may “Jacobs’s not cross in identifying with the narrator/protagonist,” (64) Warhol observes. This strategy Jacobs as a precursor to the twentieth-century politics of “marks difference.” (67) Along with the politics of difference, a second critical trend of the 1980s and is at work in Warhol’s article. In her attention to the narrator and narrate, we ‘90s see an emerging skepticism (generated mainly by French theorists, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) toward the importance of a text’s author and toward the reality of the individual-as-subject. If the first phase of Jacobs criticism read
In her article, published six after the book, Warhol acknowledges that she now had to qualify this argument because her book had implicitly and unconsciously taken white-authored texts to be narrative norms that could be universally applied. In the years between 1989 and 1995, literary criticism’s discovery and embrace of a “politics of difference” had made plain the error of that assumption. In her article, therefore, Warhol proposed to use the “binary model” of a gendered distinction between male distancing and female engaging narrators not to “fix” it as a universal or absolute but quite the opposite – to show how a text like Jacobs’s Incidents both deployed, evaded, and improvised on it. Jacobs, she went on to show, uses both kinds of narrator in her text. Sometimes her narrator is engaging and seeks to make common cause with readers, but at other times the narrator states unequivocally that her readers will never really understand her – as when she writes, “Reader, can you imagine? No, you cannot.” Warhol put the case more precisely by referring to the relation between Jacobs’s narrator and her book’s narratee (implied reader): “Jacobs’s narrator draws a line which the narratee may not cross in identifying with the narrator/protagonist,” (64) Warhol observes. This strategy “marks Jacobs as a precursor to the twentieth-century politics of difference.” (67) Along with the politics of difference, a second critical trend of the 1980s and ‘90s is at work in Warhol’s article. In her attention to the narrator and narrate, we see an emerging skepticism (generated mainly by French theorists, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) toward the importance of a text’s author and toward the reality of the individual-as-subject. If the first phase of Jacobs criticism read
Jacobs%20Chicago%20Volume%20Draft%203.docx