I'd been interested in parody for a long time, and I was also, after working on the Bloomsbury Group's esthetics for the other book, very interested in visual arts. Looking at a theoretical question such as parody seemed the perfect way to bring together these interests. Yes, I do. I think that in my life in general and in my teaching this is obvious. It is perhaps less immediately obvious in my literary criticism and theoretical work, though recently, in my work in Canadian literature and also in postmodern theory, I've worked on the relationship between feminist theory and postmodern theory.
Many writers see close relationships between feminism and postmodernism.
The similarities on the surface are formal ones. But I would say that there is a major difference, despite the similarity of strategy, and that difference comes on the level of politics. Feminism must have a theory of agency. In other words, it must go beyond subversive textual strategies to posit some mode of social action. Post-modernism, because of what I described earlier as its complicitously critical, paradoxical stand with regard to cultural dominants sits on the fence.