SOURCE: "On Defining a Sexual Aesthetic: A Portrait of the Artist as Sexual Antagonist," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, Autumn, 1984, pp. 81-94.

In the following essay, Spector uses the writings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to probe the relationship between literary and sexual creativity.

Annette Kolodny made the statement some time ago that "A good feminist criticism . . . must first acknowledge that men's and women's writing in our culture will inevitably share some common ground." More important, if feminist criticism is to flourish, it must become a versatile literary critical approach to literature by men and women. There have been recent indications from feminist scholars that it is time to include the study of male authors once again within an expanding definition of what feminist criticism ought to be and do.

Since no feminist scholar from Woolf to Kolodny has yet managed to define a feminine...