While Oliver Sacks has recently written on the problem of the blindspot in fields of science [see "Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science" in Robert B. Silvers, ed., Hidden Histories of Science (New York, 1995), pp. 141-179], the classic feminist work is Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plot and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction" (originally published in PMLA 96, 1 January, 1981 and reprinted in Miller's Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, Columbia University Press, 1988). Miller discusses the reception of Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves. Though now a "classic" and often credited with being the first true novel, this novel for centuries was considered by men (though not women) to be implausible and lacking in credibility. Miller summarizes the problem very neatly near the end of her article:
The blind spot here is both political (or philosophical) and literary. It does not see, nor does it want to, that the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs. It does not see that the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience and the encoding of that experience, in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture. To read women's literature is to see and hear repeatedly a chafing against the "unsatisfactory reality" contained in the maxim.
One can read any alternative literature or even cultural genre, such as hiphop, to take one very obvious example, in the same way-- as "a chafing against the unsatisfactory reality" contained in what passes for "the truth of human experience" dominating us all.


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