For feminist literary critics and teachers writing about and teaching literature "after feminism," the path is potentially treacherous. Feminist literary criticism, if it is applied too narrowly and used to reject complex literary texts that do not uphold an imagined feminist standard of "positive images" of women, can end up undermining other feminist goals--including helping students claim or recover their own agency and their own readings of literary texts. This has happened to the author when he taught Literature and the Contemporary: Representations of the Existential Self course. The central idea of the course was to explore literary representations of existential philosophy, and for the most part this is what he focused on as a teacher. In this note, the author focuses on his first experience teaching this course. What he learned from teaching this course is that teachers' very commitments to feminist pedagogy can undermine feminist pedagogy.