"biancas842001" <***@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:***@posting.google.com...
| bookburn wrote:
| > In his refutation, here's what R. V. Young notes about the textual
| > criticism problem alleged by NC critics: ". . . the 'close
reading'
| > practiced by the New Critics is a mere pedagogical device, an
American
| > version of explication du texte, fit only for undergraduates in
| > provincial colleges."
| >
|
| Who's R. V. Young?
|
| Anyway, that's old hat. Terry Eagleton and the Marxists (and
| post-Marxians) have already said plenty about how English literature
| studies are a means of incorporating subjects into a global empire.
| Overblown, of course (and part of what Bloom opposes), but that's a
| standard line.
|
| > The battle among adherents to New Criticism, Deconstruction, and
now
| > Bloom's return to Romanticism seems to use the same kind of
rhetoric
| > we see in h.l.a.s. by anti-Strats who allege Shakespeare has been
| > captured by formalistic academics.
| >
|
| Harold Bloom isn't anti-Deconstructionist so much as he's
anti-theory.
| He does use Freudian theory and is likely open to charges of
| inconsistency on this count, but he gets away with it by calling
Freud
| "literature," not theory. I understand he gets along fairly well
with
| the deconstructionists at Yale, both psychoanalytical and not. He
| sees our (English-language) literary culture as a Romantic culture,
| and also as a Shakespearean culture, so basically Shakespeare and
| Milton are proto-Romanticist. I can't think of anything written by
| Bloom that addresses specific theories like deconstruction as a
critic
| of them. I think he sees theory as a way for people with no real
| feeling for literature to find something to say about it.
|
| I have trouble seeing how these kinds of concerns might be
| incorporated in a question about who was "the real Shakespeare," as
| you seem to imply.
|
| [snip]
|
| ----
| Bianca S.
Young's is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and
coeditor of the John Donne Journal. His article is at:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9308/articles/young.html
Here's the way his essay begins.
(quote)
The Old New Criticism and its Critics
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
R.V. Young
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 35 (August/September 1993): 38-44.
Among the pugnacious practitioners of academic literary studies, who
agree among themselves on almost nothing, there is one consensus: the
New Criticism-that is, the old New Criticism associated with the names
of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks- that
New Criticism is over, finished, defunct. What is more, this shift in
critical fashion is widely perceived not merely as a routine scholarly
development, but as a great liberation, the lifting of an onerous
burden-as if literature professors had somehow been bearing the entire
weight of The World's Body upon their shoulders, or as if textbooks
like Understanding Poetry and Sound and Sense constituted a form of
bondage or a grand imposition on the credulity of college English
teachers. Never again, they seem to proclaim in the smug tone of
someone conscious of having recovered righteousness, will we submit to
that unhistorical formalism or subject our students to the cultural
elitism of canonical works. Everywhere the atmosphere of classrooms
and library bookstack carrels thickens with an almost palpable fog of
sanctimony.
(unquote)
I find the rhetoric in his review very colorful and intriguing, as he
goes on to describe "a very strange state of affairs" involving vying
factions of Marxists vs. Gnostics, archetypalists (Northrup Frye),
Parisian Structuralists, etc.. He doesn't get to Bloom until
paragraph 13, after considering Northrup Frye.
(quote)
. . . .
From Frye's quasi-religious perspective, literature constitutes a
"secular scripture," with its authority drawn not from its own
inherent revelatory features, but rather conferred by the interpreter,
for whom each work serves as a vehicle for his own mythic fantasies
and wish-fulfillments.
This is even more the case with one of Frye's most notable successors,
Harold Bloom, who began as a champion of the revolutionary Romantics,
especially Blake and Shelley, in the face of their depreciation by
Eliot and the New Critics. Bloom's animus against the New Criticism is
expressly political and religious, and in recent years-in Agon, for
example-he has identified himself as a "Jewish Gnostic." He adapts
Freudian concepts to the service of a visionary radicalism in which
the writing and reading of poetry are a displaced version of Oedipal
repression. The literary work becomes a contested site in which the
egos of the author, his literary predecessors, and his readers
struggle for psychic dominance.
(unquote)
Don't know if there is any ideological connection between critical
schools of interpretation and how literature is defined, and different
Shakespeare attribution theories. bb