Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

TRANSFORMING THE ACADEMY 65archial" approach considered to be unacceptable because it implicitlydenigrates those who are given lesser status. The very idea of "genius" isregarded with suspicion as elitist and "masculinist." Peggy Mcintosh isamong the proponents of this belief: "The study of literature usuallyinvolves a very few geniuses. ... To be ordinary is a sin, in the world ofmost literature teachers. . . . Only those works which distance themselvesfrom an audience, by setting themselves up in a genre separate from thereader and requiring no answer from the reader, are considered to be'literary.' " 3 2Mcintosh does not explain why a work by a genius like LeoTolstoy should be more "distancing" than a work by a twentieth-centuryfeminist novelist like Margaret Atwood or Alice Walker.The transformationist project has already strongly influenced Americanuniversities, and the scornful attitude it fosters toward traditional literaryclassics is becoming increasingly fashionable. The organizers of a literaryconference on diversity and multiculturalism in Boston in June 1991asked the two hundred-plus participating professors to list the five Americanauthors they believed most necessary to a quality education. MarkTwain got thirty-six votes; Toni Morrison, thirty-four; Maya Angelou,twenty-six; Alice Walker, twenty-four; John Steinbeck, twenty-one; MalcolmX, eighteen; Richard Wright, thirteen; James Baldwin, thirteen;Langston Hughes, thirteen; William Faulkner, eleven; Nathaniel Hawthorne,ten; Ernest Hemingway, ten; Henry David Thoreau, nine; WillaCather, eight; F. Scott Fitzgerald, seven; Dee Brown, seven; W.E.B. Du-Bois, seven; Emily Dickinson, six; Amy Tan, six; Harper Lee, five; andWalt Whitman, five. 33Thomas Palmer, the Boston Globe reporter whocovered the conference, stopped counting after Whitman. In any case,Herman Melville, whom most literary critics used to regard as the greatestAmerican writer, did not make the list. Nor did Henry James. The confereescheered the results of the poll. "This list makes me feel so much moreconnected," one participant told the Globe. I, on the other hand, wasdepressed by the results.In their critique of the imperial male culture, the transformationistfeminists do not confine themselves to impugning the history, art, andliterature of the past. They also regard logic and rationality as "phallocentric."Elizabeth Minnich traces the cultural tradition to a "few privilegedmales . . . who are usually called 'The Greeks.' " 3 4In common with manyother transformationists, Minnich believes that the conceptions of rationalityand intelligence are white, male creations: "At present. . . not onlyare students taught 'phallocentric' and 'colonial' notions of reason as theforms of rational expression, but the full possible range of expression ofhuman intelligence also tends to be forced into a severely shrunken no-