Abstract

In recent literary interpretation there is renewed interest in the political meaning, explicit or implicit, intentional or inadvertent, of all sorts of texts. One often now reads that some novel, play, poem, or essay is only apparently unrelated to political issues contemporary with either the text’s production or our current reading of it. This sort of interpretation, which is fast becoming conventional, sometimes slides too easily, I think, toward evaluation: on the one hand, insofar as a text is shown to veil its author’s self-interest with claims to larger concerns, the critic nudges this title a little out of the canon of currently engaging texts; on the other, a text expressive of a progressive political position is retrieved from the neglect it suffered from critics who veiled their self-interest with misleading talk of aesthetic standards. Either way, self-interest is now thought of as the most authentic motive an interpreter can divulge in a text. This kind of political interpretation can be defended as a healthy reaction to what is remembered as a time, now more than twenty years gone, when extrinsic criteria were disavowed and literature was said to be valuable primarily as literature. But how far has this reaction gone beyond formalism on the one hand and ideological conformity on the other toward fresh, rich terms for evaluative criticism? Not far, I think. Without strong evaluative criticism it seems unlikely, as E. D. Hirsch has argued, that academic literary criticism can intervene in the institutions of literary instruction, or indeed in the production and reception of the poetry of our contemporaries, which is my own large interest .It should be said too that the current trend toward political interpretation owes a good deal to our own narrow professional self-interest: as fewer institutional and economic resources have been directed toward the study of literature in the 1970s and 1980s, we can all remember fondly the importance that ideas, especially political ideas, seemed to hold in the 1960s. Some recent political interpretation seems to be motivated not just by a desire to maintain faith with the concerns of the 1960s, but as well by a need of scholars of humanities to generate terms that render the study of literature—or culture generally—obviously important. The political shifts of the late 1960s and early 1970s took money, jobs, and even a sense of consequence away from humanities departments. The recent move is to restore at least a sense of consequence to literary criticism. However worthy that objective, there is no reason to think that self-legitimation will lead to the development of evaluative standards appropriate to the study and enjoyment of poetry in American in 1987