This is my first criticism class, and I must say it's about time. The modern writer (maybe since the 'postmodernists' of the 60's, at least ostensibly) is acutely aware of criticism - so acutely aware that her irony has become stultified, unremarkable, soft-edged. I take this class as a writer first and foremost, and with the firm conviction that the critic isn't justified as an explainer of text, but as a writer herself approaching no less sharply but from a different angle (and hopefully with zest, wit, and deliberation, speaking hard words while advocating systems that welcome self-adjustment just as they agitate the pen of the solitary reader to response.)
Self-made human beings, the founders of thought-schools, cast long shadows. Criticism begets criticism, just as thought begets thought - anybody who has ever been caught in the endless proliferation of thinking about thought understands that we can only pontificate so far. To paraphrase Emerson, we can't spend our lives-entire in explaining. And, yet, as Freud has taught us, there are primary urges beyond the metaphorical unit of the word itself, ideology is lethal at its most invisible, and history cannot be ignored - what is not there in the text is often at the forefront, and revisiting texts in political modes - marxism, feminism, racial theory - can provide us with a fresh outlook, especially towards where our fiction is going/ should be going.
On the other hand, the eminent and often vilified Harold Bloom lives in my other ear, and he is a force to be reckoned with (however offensive some may find him - my personal view is that he's appointed himself as a pariah to remind us of something rather important) - what he calls the 'school of resentment,' simply defined as a spawn of political theorists with little interest in text beyond an exclusive agenda, is something i've experienced and something I believe in, even fear to an extent (as someone who fell in love with books as so many of us have, on a rainy day curled up with a book and convinced that i'd tapped into raw beauty, something finally approaching an honest version of empathy) - how long before the sublime splendor of texts, the indescribable power that reminds us that Being is for itself, is usurped by agendas (however benign) and reduced to little more than political tract. How long before primacy is overwhelmed by what is by nature secondary, and writing becomes a byproduct of liberal guilt. What has become of whimsy? And what of our essential solitude where all expanse begins?
It is not an easy question, but I believe it's a worthwhile one. I look forward to reading all sorts of texts in the class, but these are the primary questions that ground my readings.
