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
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