Debunkism
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My least favorite intellectual trend:
* You read a novel, say about the horrors of slavery, and proceed to write an article on it.
* In this paper your job is to find the subconscious and embarrassing subtext of the novel---the actual attitude of the novelist toward his material that the novelist has unwittingly betrayed but that you, the critic, are on to.
* Example: In the anti-slavery novel, the author, far from being the progressive champion of abolition that he thinks he is, has through the subconsciously transmitted subtext of his novel shown himself to be a repressed and regressive racist.
* You, the critical genius, have successfully "debunked" the author's claim to humanitarianism, not to mention his pretense of literary communication.
This has been the primary critical approach to cultural production for the last 40 years. And there's some merit to this approach. We live in a super-self-conscious culture that's extremely sophisticated about public communication. Everyday people are adept at decoding advertising and political messages. And novelists are not magically exempt from the tendency to hold, hide, and then betray distasteful attitudes.
The problem is that Debunkism has completely colonized the minds of cultural critics, to the point that they can't see that their reading is, 90 percent of the time, an act of imaginative construction. And that they are relying on their own psychoanalysis of the author, despite neither having studied psychoanalysis nor actually knowing the author at all. They are replacing the author's fiction with their own fiction. I know this gets into reader theory, but it's an important distinction---what a story can be MADE to say and what it actually says.
Here are some recent examples that have ticked me off:
* An article that purported to show how Dances with Wolves was anti-Indian
* The critics who think The Lord of the Rings is about keeping classes in their place
* The Atlantic Monthly writer who accused Jonathan Franzen of being a rabid anti-experimentalist, despite his glowing reviews and support of experimental novels
* The NPR music critic who finds that Madonna's latest album smacks of "desperation"
This probably sounds like Harold-Bloom-like conservatism, but I don't really think that way. All I'm saying is, when evaluating a work of art, it helps not to make things up, no matter how avant-garde and appealing the fiction.
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My least favorite intellectual trend:
* You read a novel, say about the horrors of slavery, and proceed to write an article on it.
* In this paper your job is to find the subconscious and embarrassing subtext of the novel---the actual attitude of the novelist toward his material that the novelist has unwittingly betrayed but that you, the critic, are on to.
* Example: In the anti-slavery novel, the author, far from being the progressive champion of abolition that he thinks he is, has through the subconsciously transmitted subtext of his novel shown himself to be a repressed and regressive racist.
* You, the critical genius, have successfully "debunked" the author's claim to humanitarianism, not to mention his pretense of literary communication.
This has been the primary critical approach to cultural production for the last 40 years. And there's some merit to this approach. We live in a super-self-conscious culture that's extremely sophisticated about public communication. Everyday people are adept at decoding advertising and political messages. And novelists are not magically exempt from the tendency to hold, hide, and then betray distasteful attitudes.
The problem is that Debunkism has completely colonized the minds of cultural critics, to the point that they can't see that their reading is, 90 percent of the time, an act of imaginative construction. And that they are relying on their own psychoanalysis of the author, despite neither having studied psychoanalysis nor actually knowing the author at all. They are replacing the author's fiction with their own fiction. I know this gets into reader theory, but it's an important distinction---what a story can be MADE to say and what it actually says.
Here are some recent examples that have ticked me off:
* An article that purported to show how Dances with Wolves was anti-Indian
* The critics who think The Lord of the Rings is about keeping classes in their place
* The Atlantic Monthly writer who accused Jonathan Franzen of being a rabid anti-experimentalist, despite his glowing reviews and support of experimental novels
* The NPR music critic who finds that Madonna's latest album smacks of "desperation"
This probably sounds like Harold-Bloom-like conservatism, but I don't really think that way. All I'm saying is, when evaluating a work of art, it helps not to make things up, no matter how avant-garde and appealing the fiction.
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posted by Anonymous at
2:28 PM
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