Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 4 стр.

                           FOREWORD

                                      Alas! A woman that attempts the pen
                                such an intruder on the rights of men!

      The aim of stories selected for reading and entitled “Gender
Readings” is to bring together a spectrum of approaches and positions
within their common focus writing by and about Men. Some scholars
are accustomed to assume that there are two literatures: one for men,
another — for women. Thus referring the first to serious as it most
often deals with war and the latter to popular as it deals with feelings.
And the absence of women-authors may provoke us to think that the
masculine viewpoint is considered normal and the feminine — diver-
gent. It is supposed that female students are expected to internalize
male values. After reading this book the students are expected to inter-
nalize both male and female values.
      Each story is written from the individual standpoint of its au-
thor and speaks for itself, but each raises problems that are of com-
mon concern to the collection as a whole — problems ranging from
the nature of male and female literary tradition to assessing the deci-
sive innovations made by men and women writers.
      Above all, what does writing as a woman and a man mean? What
are the specifications of the language of each gender? These are the
questions to be answered after reading each of these stories. For
questions like these there are no easy answers. We wouldn’t like to
impose a feministic viewpoint on the female oriented studenthood of
our department, but we’d like to prove there’s one literature percept-
ed by both sexes:
                        We would say
                             “Long live women!”
                        But we cannot say
                             “Short live men!”
                        Both need freedom
                        As proclaimed Kate Chopin!
      So, ladies first¾

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