Spivak and the Literary Canon

Abstract

In Other Worlds, Outside in the Teaching Machine and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason are not just collections of theoretical essays that touch upon such disparate issues as the question of the clitoris, the problematic of value and other kindred issues, but an assemblage of critical pieces that try to translate the theoretical insights into practical avenues. Literary critic by vocation and persuasion, Spivak shifts her scope of attention to the analysis of Western imagination as typified by some of its luminaries: Alighieri Dante, William Bulter Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf. Spivak also foregrounds literature produced by the natives and presents two short stories by the Bengali woman writer Mahasweta Devi to be followed by a group of other stories under the title, Imaginary Maps. On both sides, the figure of woman destabilizes texts and discloses their latent meanings.