[ginger]

The following is a quote from Harold Bloom's forward to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. (I haven't read the whole thing yet, I'm just starting it.)

"Aesthetic and other cognitive values doubtless still exist, but not in the universities, where the new multiculturists denounce the aesthetic as a colonialist and patriarchal mask. Poetry, demystified, has been leveled."

This is obviously a very strong statement, but I agree with Bloom to some degree. Personally, I'm a bit resistant to New Historicism and it's unrelenting emphasis on race, class and gender. I enjoy literature most when it seems to transcend its specific time and place and generate a deep sense of human connection. I think that's why I fell in love with books in the first place, and I suspect a lot of readers feel the same way. I have a hard time believing that politics alone has kept the classics in print for hundreds of years.

New Historicism seems to emphasize difference above all else. My feeling is that differences are more obvious than similarities. Do I really need a whole host of critics to tell me that Byron could be terribly misogynist at times? No. Does/should his woman-hating keep me from identifying with other ideas in his work? No. Will overlooking Byron's misogyny make me more willing to overlook the same in contemporary writers? No.

When I read a text, I'd rather make a mental note of the author's racist, sexist, classist tendencies and then move on to the interesting stuff, but New Historicism is the predominate critical mode right now, and as a student I can't get away from it. I wonder though, whether it belongs more to the social sciences than the arts.

Does art still have a place in modern literary criticism? How does this trend affect us as poets? Has our art been leveled? Is every poem I write simply the product of a white, female, working class/university educated mind, or can I transcend my own biography? Can any of us?

I'm curious to hear what others think.

Ginger

[SteveWal]

Interesting question, Ginger. Here's my two-pence worth.

I think poetry and art can transcend gender - after all, what do we know of Homer, or the author of the Song of Songs?

However, I think it would be wrong to totally ignore the fact that Byron was a mysogynist, or that Larkin or TS Eliot had their unpleasant sides. It might help us both as readers and critics not to put great writers on too high a pedestal if we realise that they're human too.

It doesn't make me stop reading Eliot to know that he might have been anti-semitic, though, and Shakespeare's possible "gay identity" doesn't make Hamlet either more or less great.

I suspect that some great literature may have been suppressed for a time for "political" reasons in the past (by "political" here, I'm refering more to the way that some ages suppress certain aesthetic proceedures because they're uncomfortable with them, like the 18th century attempts to give Shakespeare happy endings.) But not for ever, and in the end, the good stuff just shines through.

But that's literature in English: I'm not sure whether it works when you're talking of literature from other cultures. How many of us have read the Kalevala or the Upanishads, and did we find them aesthetically pleasing or just strange? Would African tales be counted as great literature (in the manner of Aesop's fables?) I don't know.

Then again, there's plenty in any age that's worth reading that might not be great, but which can still have power. I often find myself delighted as much by the almost-unknown as by the greats. Anyone for Mathilde Blind, Burns Singer or Nicholas Moore?

------------------
Steve Waling

[Richard Wakefield]

Ginger:
Ralph Ellison says somewhere that the imagination is integrative: It finds connections; it includes. A metaphor, after all, is an imaginative connection.
I think the first and best impulse behind much of contemporary literary criticism was to make connections that had long been disallowed. It is interesting to read "Pride and Prejudice" and try to connect the characters' wealth and leisure to the slavery that produced it. It's interesting to read Byron and think about the cultural values that allowed him to relegate half the human race to the role of mysterious playthings.
Like any other impulse, that one became corrupted by opportunism and fashion. Much discussion of literature now, especially on campus, amounts to deciding which ghetto to place it in: gay, black, feminist, Hispanic. So that urge to make connections has become instead an urge to impose divisions.
But I still agree with Ellison. There's little in my experience to compare with reading a poem and discovering I can connect with another human being -- and strangely enough, the connection I discover is often with his or her connections; that is, the poet offers a metaphor and I say, "Of course!" As critics and teachers, we could hardly find a higher calling than passing that experience on.
RPW

[reader]

Well, I’m way over my head here, but maybe I can work backward, from Richard to Ginger. If a metaphor implies a resemblance, it must of necessity imply that the two terms started out different; that something was transfered from one to the other because they were indeed different. I think difference is the vehicle between the two terms. So I would have to disagree with both Richard and Ralph Ellison. I would insist that art depends on difference. Take a cliché as compared to a fresh expression. The later would have to be a different way of seeing, standing out from the previous, stale ways of seeing, of expressing. Another example would be thought, at its most basic, which depends on opposition, and comparison, certainly not on identity. This convinces me that in differences is consciousness. Without difference there is no consciousness. Without difference there is no plot, no history, no personality, only potential.


Applying that to Ginger’s question is more difficult for me. I tend to think it is a poor question that you pose Ginger. Perhaps Mr. Bloom has misled us into thinking the entire schematic has changed, when it is just his position in it which has. Maybe once he was on the edge, had "difference;" maybe that “mystification” has now evolved to others and has left him embedded in sameness. I think that it is a poor question because it is locked in an either/or position, excluding the possibility that both sides can coexist. I am classified as a poor, uneducated white man, but at the same time am I not exquisitely myself with all the riches that implies? Of course.

I seriously doubt what I just said made any difference.

[Richard Wakefield]

Reader:
That's a striking rejoinder. Yes, difference is necessary -- I suppose it's a bit like thermodynamics: without a temperature differential there can be no movement. Or like meteorology: without pressure differentials, no weather. But the key, I think, is the dialogue or the creative tentsion between differences and similarities. Ellison's integrative imagination doesn't claim identity between the things being compared, only instrutive similarity. The poet (and the reader) always understand "how far they can ride the metaphor before it collapses," as Frost put it. My love is a red, red rose, except that I don't spread manure around her feet and sprinkle her with aphid dust.
RPW

[Susan McLean]

Ginger, can we transcend our own biography? No. The time, the place, the gender, the class, the race we are born into all leave us with indelible marks on our psyches and blind spots that we are unaware of. Dickens wrote, in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, that we are all impenetrable mysteries to one another at the deepest levels. I think what modern criticism is doing is trying to make us aware of one another's blind spots. It doesn't entirely eliminate them, but it is preferable to blithely assuming that everyone else thinks just the way we do. The great writers are the ones that assume that other people are also human beings like themselves, just as complex and contradictory and fallible. They empathize instead of condescending.

I think that modern criticism has gone too far in focusing on the differences and ignoring the similarities. Eventually the extremes will wear out their welcome, but we will all be better off for paying some attention to those differences, which were all too easy to ignore in the past.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Academics zinging their ideological rivals should always be read with a certain wariness. In those two sentences, Bloom is setting up an easily knocked down straw man, indulging in an absurdly reductive bit of faculty-lounge theory-war trash talking.

As for race/class/gender/etc. and how it figures in our reading and writing, there are some genuinely fascinating issues to explore behind all the publish-or-perish bloviation of theorists who are more interested in careerist turf battles than in promoting an understanding of literature.

On the one hand, none of us lives outside of history, none of us avoids being shaped and influenced by all the cultural inputs we encounter, none of us is purely a reader or writer distinct from all the other social/economic/biochemical/etc. aspects of our identities. On the other hand, it's ridiculous to believe that any theoretical construct based on all those other identifiers can tell us everything worth knowing about a work of literature. It's more than just incidental that Allen Ginsberg was Jewish and gay, but there are lots of Jews who didn't write "Kaddish" and lots of queer shoulders that have been put to the wheel without producing "America" -- just as there are lots of drunks who don't write like Thomas and Berryman, lots of junkies who don't write like Coleridge, and lots of suicidal housewives who don't write like Plath and Sexton. It's foolish to ignore biography, no less foolish to fixate on it. In some cases, knowledge about the social history of Elizabethan London or 19th-century Amherst can truly enhance our reading of Shakespeare and Dickinson; in some cases it can sidetrack us with a mass of irrelevant distractions. I'm not sure I'd always trust Harold Bloom to tell me which cases are which.