tegy developed to explore and explicate such texts. Indeed, it can even be suggested that virtually all criticism û even those types of critical inquiries that are positioned within an alternative theoretical school û involve some element of a readerÆs own response.
In the present study, which focuses on a single work by Jamaica Kincaid, reader-response criticism will be employed to assess the central themes in The Autobiography of My Mother. To illustrate the viability of reader-response criticism, this study will also examine other critical analyses of KincaidÆs novel. For example, Craig Seligman (12), a former colleague of Kincaid at the New Yorker, has studied KincaidÆs writing and has argued that running throughout her work is a strong element of bitterness, even of anger, which validates the female while denying the efficacy of the male.
Other critics, including Diane Simmons (23), believe that KincaidÆs work invariably produces crises of loss centering upon the mother, and any consideration of KincaidÆs writing must begin with an examination of this theme. Positioning Kincaid and her work, in the view of Simmons (24), requires recognition on the part of the reader-critic of KincaidÆs own primary preoccupations, including her experiences as a woman of color, of the Caribbean, and of a people formerly enslaved by European colonials. Simmons (60-61) also maintains that regardless of the gender of the reader of KincaidÆs work, one must recognize and become involved in a feminist project that is indigenous to this work.
Critics, including Rose-Myriam Rejouis (214), contend that such a feminist project is integral to KincaidÆs work: ôKincaidÆs strategy reflects her priorities: to find a voice for an independent female Caribbean self who must face womanhood, colonialism, and exile.ö The first-person narrative style adopted by Kincaid, says Rejouis (215), makes it clear that the feminine or the fema...