What is the relation of criticism to literature? What does it mean to call oneself a woman? What does a (feminine) coming to writing "la venue a l'ecriture," in Cixous's phrase imply? How may feminist strategies of reading appropriate the literary theory developed in France since the 1960s? What is involved in reading "like a woman?" These are some of the questions Mary Lydon explores in Skirting the Issue.Identifying with a series of French literary theorists, she adopts their manner rather than their putative "method" as she responds to selected French artists and writers of the late...