Mythic Methodologies & Legendary Lit Reviews, Part 1 (A Research Update)

 

It’s been a while since I wrote about my research progress. So, this post will be dedicated to catching you all up on what I’ve been up to, and then a brief exploration of what I’ve been doing in my Theoretical Framework! 

Way back at the beginning of 2021 (where has this year gone?), I finished a draft of my final thesis chapter, ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’, meaning that I had first drafts of all the “main body” chapters of my thesis (i.e., not including my introduction, conclusion, or theoretical framework). 

In a fit of grandiosity, I labelled the next stage of the PhD process ‘The Era of Redrafts’. I went back to each of those chapters, printed out hard copies with all my supervisors’ comments on, then I re-read and annotated them (by which I mean, wrote all over them in colourful pens). After this, I went back to the chapter on my computer and redrafted it. When I wrote about this process for the SGSAH blog, I really focused on the joy that stationary brings me:

Yellow highlighters, colourful felt tips, multicoloured fine liners, a biro that writes so smoothly you want to weep. Rulers, and pencils sharpened to a satisfying point. Post-it notes of various shapes and colours, paperclips, bull-clips. Glitter glue. Even writing this list, just thinking about exciting stationary, has put a big smile on my face.

I would recommend colour coding your chapters, too! My first chapter is pink, my second chapter is purple, third is blue, fourth is red, and fifth is orange. Or maybe you’d like to go with the traffic light system: red for the bits that need to be cut, orange for the parts that need improving, and green for the bits you want to keep.

The printed-out hard-copies of my chapters, that were once just piles of anxiety and imposter syndrome, are now a rainbow of improvement. There is just something so cheerful and cathartic about crossing out parts of your work with a purple felt tip, or drawing arrows with a pink fineliner, and it just makes what was previously quite a daunting or arduous job much more fun!

What comes after ‘The Era of Redrafts’? ‘The Ascendancy of Theory’, obviously. Which is to say, writing my ‘Theoretical Framework’. My ‘Theoretical Framework’ is divided into two parts: a ‘Methodology’ (how I am going to do my research) and a ‘Literature Review’ (what I need to know to do my research). 

The rest of this blog post is going to be about the methodology section of my theoretical framework. My methodology, like most methodologies, is probably quite dry and uninteresting to people who aren't the person doing the research, i.e. me. In an attempt to not bore you to tears and in acknowledgement of the fact that you were perhaps enticed here by the very cute highland cow cover picture, I will try to be brief in my summary. 

Telling the squad about
my methodology x

In one sentence, the methodology for my thesis combines close textual analysis with a variety of predominantly feminist approaches to literary criticism and classical studies. 

In slightly more than one sentence: 

If a methodology is “how I am going to do my research”, I am going to do my research using feminist literary criticism and feminist reception theory.  

What is meant by feminist literary criticism? In Humm’s model (1994: 7-8), feminist criticism addresses four issues in literary criticism. Firstly, by re-examining male texts, androcentric literary history is addressed, and patriarchal portrayals of women are confronted. Secondly, the invisibility of women writers is highlighted, and a new literary history is charted with neglected women’s writing and oral history being recovered. Third, feminist criticism constructs a “feminist reader”, by offering new methods and theory, and – fourth – we are encouraged to act as feminist readers by creating new writing and discourse.

Gynocriticism is not — as has been suggested to me — the study of vaginal literature, but the study of women writers and female readership. Under more modern scrutiny, the name of this discourse is not as inclusive as we would wish, suggesting, as it does, an inextricable link between having a vagina and being a woman. I would encourage us to suspend that critique for a moment, since gynocriticism is a product of the 1970s/1980s. To be clear, trans-exclusionary feminism should not be given a pass, particularly in more recent discourse, but despite the fact that second wave* feminism often falsely equates having a vagina to being a woman and having a penis to being a man (hence phallogocentrism), it should not be unilaterally written off as transphobic and useless. 

*I do not, as a rule, subscribe to the wave metaphor in feminism, but that is a rant for another day/blog post. 

Anyway, formative gynocritic Elaine Showalter defines gynocriticism as ‘the feminist study of women’s writing, including readings of women’s texts and analyses of the intertextual relations both between women writers (a female literary tradition) and between women and men’ (Showalter 1990: 189; in Allen 2000: 141). Like methodologies within Women’s Studies, Showalter proposes gynocrticism ‘In contrast to this angry or loving fixation on male literature,’ in previous literary criticism (Showalter 1979; 2011: 224). Instead, the goal of gynocriticism is to ‘construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories’ (Ibid., 224). My approach of textual analysis is gynocritical, because my thesis is focused on the female literary tradition of rewriting Greek myth, particularly in contemporary women’s writing, and I am situating myself as a specifically feminist reader of women’s literature.

I also, as you might expect, spend a fair bit of time in my methodology talking about feminist myth criticism, as well as the idea of writing as re-vision. In ‘When We Dead Awaken’, Adrienne Rich conceptualises re-vision as ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering a text from a new critical direction’ (Rich 1972: 18). Rich categorises this method of literary criticism as specifically radical and feminist, an act of looking back at women’s portrayals in literary history – as two-dimensional symbols in the service of men’s writing – and revising them in celebration of women’s real, lived and written, experiences (Ibid., 18-20). Feminist adaptations of Greek myth are acts of re-vision, revisiting portrayals of women from myth and revising them with fresh perspectives. 

Classical reception is the study of the ways in which Classical mythology has survived from antiquity to the present day. It is an enormous subject that includes mythological handbooks in the Hellenistic Age; the work of Roman poets such as Ovid and Virgil;  the treatment of myths in Middle Ages manuscripts; their rediscovery in the art and literature of the Renaissance; their treatment by Shakespeare and Milton; how myths have been used in literature from the eighteenth century to present; their use in philosophy and psychology; and the manifestations of myth in recent music and films. 

I personally really like Hanink’s description of the ‘traditional reception template’ as ‘X author/artist’s use of Y ancient text/idea/motif’ (Hanink 2017: np.). Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am most interested in radical models of Classical reception theory, such as Critical Classical reception that acknowledges, explicitly or implicitly, that Greco-Roman antiquity has ‘played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures’ (Ibid., np.). In my analyses of how Classics is being used to narrate racism, hegemony, and gender-based violence, I employ a methodology aligned with critical Classical reception.

Of course, the most useful facet of critical classical reception to the research undertaken in my thesis is feminist classical reception.  The current vogue of feminist revisionist myth writing has been deployed as evidence for the increasing popularity of feminist reception in Classics (Hinds 2019: np.). Such retellings are works of feminist Classical reception because of they are ‘Rejecting the misogynistic model presented in the ancient source material and refreshing myths through the lens of otherwise voiceless characters,’ (Ibid., np.). Zakjo considers ‘how richly feminism at one time irrigated even the most dryly canonical of classical landscapes’, though she firmly states that ‘new brands of feminism’ – that is, more recent, intersectional models of feminism – are slow to present themselves in the field of Classics (Zajko 2011: 200; 202). This is a sentiment shared more recently by Hinds, who asks in her consideration of consent in mythical retellings, ‘If we can’t get cis, white feminism right in reception, then how can we ever hope to get intersectional feminism right? I want to see intersectional feminist reception of classical myths bloom,’ (Hinds 2019: np). 

There are examples outside of the scope of my thesis that also demonstrate the current popularity of feminist reception in Classics. As feminist scholars Kennerly and Woods note, Wonder Woman, Patty Jenkins’ 2017 movie for DC, was an occasion of Classical reception, related to the work already underway on Classical reception in comics and the Classics in modern fantasy (2017: np.). 

Wonder Woman was described by Kennerly and Woods as having ‘one well-greaved leg in the ancient world and one in ours’: ultimately, a research project with one leg in Classics and one in contemporary literary studies requires an equally interdisciplinary methodology. 

I hope you enjoyed this research update & brief insight into the methodological workings of my thesis. I am hoping to continue this series with further snippets from my 'Theoretical Framework'. Hopefully the future ones will be more interesting, for instance when I share why I wrote about Beyoncé in my Literature Review! 

Cover image source