Feminism Definition of Terms
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In this study, I use feminist criticism to support the critical approaches. Humm 1992 states feminist criticism gives more adequate attention to women
writers, a space to the women critic, and space to the idea of women theorists. According to Humm, feminist criticism shares three basic assumptions. The first
means that gender influences the writing style and the ideology of each gender can be seen from a literary work. The style shows the ideology of each gender.
For this reason, feminist criticism needs to include general interpretations of the cultural theory or ideology of each individual writer p. 6-7. The second major
assumption is that there are sex-related writing strategies. Men and women use language in different ways on writing their literary work. They use different
vocabularies and different kinds of sentences p. 7-8. The last assumption is that even if some male critics acknowledge the first two criticism above, the
continuing traditions of which it is a part, uses male norms to exclude or undervalue female writing and scholarship p.8.
Feminist theory critics or feminist approaches attempt to explain how men and women imbalance, due to gender, are reflected in literature text. In its
diversity, feminism is concerned with the position of women in a secondary position, where women do not gain equal position with men. According to
Goodman in Literature and Gender, feminist literary criticism is an academic approach to the study of literature which applies feminist thought to the analysis
of literary texts and the contexts of their production and reception. It has developed in recent years into a fascinating and highly specialized field with a
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language, set of theories and a vocabulary all its own as cited in Setyorini, 2009 p.9