• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 925 0

its own past. The elements of philology, close reading, myth, allegory, image and symbol, history, biography, context, and reception (or, to employ another familiar formulation, emphasis upon the author, the text, or the reader) follow upon one another cyclically. The sequence is not always the same: an interest in history can be provoked by an overemphasis on textual reading that seems to ignore context, but close textual reading can also lead to an interest in philology and the multiple, sometimes irreconcilable, roots and meanings of words. What is certain, if the past is any indication, is this: that no one way of reading or interpreting literature is the best. There are many good, or strong, ways of reading a literary text, and the more satisfying one mode of reading may be, the more likely it is to provoke a different kind of interpretation or approach from the next generation of readers. There is no way of solving a novel or poem or other piece of imaginative writing that will be definitive. We could say, borrowing a precept from physics, that every reading produces an equal and opposite rereading. (By equal and opposite I don’t necessarily mean “just as good” or “completely the reverse” but, rather, a decided push in another direction. Perhaps it would be clearer to say that every way of reading produces an equal and opposite way of rereading, although individual readings are often flash points for such energized disavowals.)

Sometimes things in the world affect the nature and fortunes of literary analysis. The much ballyhooed disappearance of the printed book, supposed to be imminent with the arrival of the Internet and the e-book, has clearly helped generate an enormous interest in book history and the social—and technical—history of reading. Likewise, the current focus on human affect, the emotions and the passions, is in part a response to the discourse of cyborgs, cloning, genomics, and human/machine and human/animal boundaries. I think the interest in ethics by scholars in the immediate post-deconstruction days owed something to the insistence by opponents of deconstruction that it looked at nothing outside the text (despite Derrida’s long-standing engagement with philosophy and politics). Certainly when, after his death and the discovery of his wartime writings, Paul de Man was accused of being a Nazi collaborator, ethical issues rose to the fore, as some critics suggested that the whole of deconstruction was a cover-up for collaboration during World War II. These are contributory causes, not explicit prompts or reasons, and few if any participants in such lively areas of thinking and research are likely to explain their interest as a result of any kind of cultural anxiety or psychological compensation rather than an intrinsic attraction to the field.

Nonetheless, looked at over time, social, political, and scientific events can be seen to nudge literary studies in various directions. Like every other intellectual activity or event, literary studies have an unconscious as well as a conscious. (Fredric Jameson’s phrase “the political unconscious,” like Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style in American politics,” has become a standard expression in cultural analysis, and the critical unconscious seems close to a pleonasm, since so much of what is most powerful in literary analysis begins with a hunch and goes on to seek evidence and proof. Without evidence and proof, there is no argument; but without intuition and risk, there is no challenge to verities and truisms, and thus no advance in thought.

Plainly, though, the use of literary criticism is not the same as the use of literature. As Harold Brooks’s opening remarks suggest, he views literary criticism as a helping discipline, one that will assist the “complete human being” in encountering and understanding literary works. Whether the purpose of such an understanding is completed and fulfilled by this encounter (“the education of feeling, and of the sensibilities”), or whether it requires and expects a further application “in understanding, through the