< previous page | page_26 | next page > |
Page 26 through her madness, and then through suicide. Even Hero, who is falsely accused, must temporarily be taken out of social circulation and proclaimed dead if her chastity is to be (re)proven. The body of Shakespeare’s text, on the other hand, seems to circulate endlessly without the playwright losing his reputation, no matter how unwholesome the meanings his texts seem to yield. No matter how many hands ravish it, the poet’s name remains chaste. The reason for the continued “chastity” of Shakespeare’s reputation is, of course, that in our competitive or adversarial climate critics overwhelmingly hold each other responsible for meanings “found” in the plays. Curiously, no one blames Shakespeare for yielding so many meanings; no one blames Shakespeare for meaning so much.10 Despite this elusiveness and the eclectic character of literary criticism, I do not mean to suggest that whatever is, is right; rather, that whatever is, is—and will be as long as it falls within the current academic or professional paradigm. When the paradigm shifts, what is will be no more, although it may continue as literary history, as fodder for new generations of critics to discover how previous generations were shaped by history. What critical paradigm are we currently living in? If we believe Kernan, we are entering literature’s twilight; he speaks of literature’s imminent “[c]ultural obsolescence’’ (1990:10). Why does a preoccupation with feminist or Marxist or psychoanalytic issues spell the doom of literature as a “positive value”? When Kernan refers to critics who conceive of literature “as suppressing any movement toward freedom from authority” (213), he is talking about a narrow, Greenblattian version of “containment” that has been under severe attack from cultural materialists, feminists, and even from some of Greenblatt’s own new historicist followers.11 In truth, few critics today view literature as a simple extension of the state apparatus, though Kernan implies that most of them do. Surely, most radical critics would insist that they teach Shakespeare in a way that leads toward freedom and away from authority. Indeed, if, as Kernan admits, literature “often treated women in at times contemptuous, nearly always a patronizing fashion” (212), then how can it be harmful when scholars, teachers, and students discuss the texts in those terms to learn about the history of gender relations? Why does this, as Kernan claims, put Shakespeare and literature in general “out of business” (212)? What is more, my experience in the classroom suggests that no critical movement has done more than feminism to save Shakespeare from obsolescence. How can Shakespeare possibly stay vital |
||
< previous page | page_26 | next page > |