SOURCE: Howard, June. “Feminist Differings: Recent Surveys of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1988): 167-90.

In the following review, Howard surveys various volumes of feminist thought, including Sexual/Textual Politics, praising Moi's book for showing “an extraordinary range, sophistication, and power.”

The title of one of the books I review in this essay—Making a Difference—evokes some crucial elements of the situation of feminist literary criticism and theory at this moment. Feminist critics, like those of other persuasions, necessarily write these days in dialogue with (whether from or against) a theoretical perspective in which “difference” is a privileged term. From Ferdinand de Saussure's “in language there are only differences” to Jacques Derrida's “différance” and since, the recognition of the way in which meaning is constituted through difference, and the way in which our apparently stable world is ceaselessly constituted and reconstituted through language...