Question

"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."

Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".

But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.

According to the passage, modernists are changing literary criticism by:

• A. Noting instances of hostility between men and women
• B. Seeing literature from fresh points of view
• C. Studying the works of early twentieth-century writers
• D. Reviewing books written by feminists

Hint:

Look at the passage's closing lines about perspective.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

The passage explains that literary criticism has taken a long time to catch up with a theme that modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence already recognized: the emancipation and independence of women. The final part of the passage states that we are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them, and that now women are present in large enough numbers to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature. This means the change in criticism comes from readers and critics approaching old texts with new perspectives, not from any new set of facts.

Option 1 is incorrect because the passage does not say critics are simply cataloguing examples of conflict between men and women. It says the perspective brought to the text is what has changed. Option 3 is incorrect because the passage is not about studying early twentieth century writers as an activity, it uses those writers as evidence of an old theme, not as the method of the criticism itself. Option 4 is incorrect because the passage never restricts this new criticism to books written by feminists, it talks about reinterpreting all of literary history, including works like the Agamemnon that predate feminism as a movement.

The correct reading is that literary criticism is changing because readers now interpret literature from a fresh point of view, which matches option 2.