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Ken wrote: > If a man says that Professor Greer is saying preposterous things, he can > expect to be treated to an "I told you so" by Professor Greer or her > adherents. If a woman debunks the statements, I don't know how she > would be treated. She can be vicious to women (she's traded insults with many public women). I read an amazing article by Greer the other day which claimed that all women spend all their time either shopping or cleaning and that they don't know how to enjoy themselves. (Except presumably Ms Greer). She seems to think that women live in ads. So anyone who disagrees with her is basically a dickhead too busy scrubbing toilets to have a brain. On 6/5/06 1:08 AM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > For Greer it probably is true that literature (and literary criticism, > and indeed writing in general) is a form of aggressive display. She's > quite good at it, too, within those parameters. But there are male and > female writers for whom those parameters are largely irrelevant, and > whom she inevitably either dismisses or misreads as a result. Her book Slipshod Sibyls is infuriating - some very interesting chapters on people like Aphra Benn and Christina Rosetti (which made me in fact reevaluate Rosetti) and then an epilogue where she basically blasts Maina Tseaeyeva (!) and Sylvia Plath for being show off victims by killing themselves and claims that modern women poets are all whiney and spineless. This annoyed me because Greer is calling all through the books for a certain kind of poet - formally confident and assertive, sexually frank - and yet doesn't mention two shining examples of exactly that kind of poet who also happen to be Australian (Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood). I can't believe, as a fellow Australian, she doesn't know of them, both are famous here; so the only other possibility is that she is ignoring them; worse, by claiming such poets don't exist at all, she is scraping them and the possibilities they created off the map, just to feed her thesis. I thought and still think it intellectually dishonest. Best A Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com