Letters to the Editor
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pollution of agency
I have not read Katha Pollitt's book, but this review of it makes me think of Joanna Russ' "How to Suppress Women's Writing". Russ details a number of ways that women's writing is not literature ... it's called "confessional" or critics call the subject inappropriate, especially when it is anger or sex.
Writing about breakups means writing about anger AND sex.
The feminists out there who are troubled about the subject of this book should probably go back and read Russ again ... or for the first time! Who knows if anyone ever reads it anymore. Russ is an SF writer, not an academic (as far as I know) and wrote this book in the 70s about the refusal of academics to include women writers in the literary canon on the theory that it is "not literature". It's a really interesting book.