Gender, Theory and the Canon

The author of this book takes to the battlefield of current debates about humanities education with a clear strategic goal: to reread five texts canonical to modern European intellectual history from a perspective that is profoundly informed by awareness of gender issues - Descartes' "Meditations", Marx's "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", and Nietzsche's "The Gay Science". These works from the canon, Winders argues, either present striking representations of femininity or are conspicuously silent on the question of gender at precisely those junctures where their arguments or stylistic effects depend on unstated gender assumptions and prejudices. To grasp this is to understand how values central to our cultural inheritance - truth, reasons, the self, work, pleasure, and desire - have been constructed by a predominantly white male intellectual tradition.