Cultural criticism and literature

For further reading

Atkins, G. Douglas. Reading Deconstruction: Deconstructive Reading. Lexington: Uni‑ versity of Kentucky Press, 1983. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 1980. (See especially “Decon‑ structing the Text,” 103–24.) Crowley, Sharon. A Teacher’s Introduction to Deconstruction. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1989. Fink, Thomas. “Reading Deconstructively in the Two‑Year College Introductory Litera‑ ture Classroom.” Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses. Ed.

James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1991. 239–47. Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1983. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. New York: Rout‑ ledge, 2002. Sarup, Mandan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Ath‑ ens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

For advanced readers

Abel, Elizabeth. Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. ———. Blindness and Insight. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Balti‑ more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” 1966. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio

Donato. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. 247–65. Esch, Deborah. “Deconstruction.” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New

York: Modern Language Association, 1992. 374–91. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cam‑ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Naas, Michael. Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Royle, Nicholas, ed. Deconstructions: A User’s Guide. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ———. Jacques Derrida. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Works cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Frost, Robert. “Mending Wall.” 1914. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery

Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

9 New historical and cultural criticism

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, critical theories can overlap with one another in a number of ways. Marxists can draw on psychoanalytic concepts to help them analyze the debilitating psychological effects of capitalism. Feminists can draw on Marxist concepts to examine the socioeconomic oppression of women. Essays analyzing the conventions of American literary interpretation can be included both in structuralist anthologies and in reader‑response anthologies. And so forth. Despite such overlap, however, most critical theories remain distinct from one another in terms of their purpose. Let’s look, for example, at the very different goals of the critical theories just mentioned. Marxism attempts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experi‑ ence. Feminism attempts to reveal the ways in which patriarchal gender roles are the ultimate source of our experience. Psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the ways in which repressed psychological conflicts are the ultimate source of our experience. Structuralism attempts to reveal the simple structural systems that make possible our understanding of an otherwise chaotic world. And reader‑ response theory attempts to reveal the operations whereby readers create the texts they read. Sometimes critical theories overlap so much, however, that it is difficult to deter‑ mine the ways in which they are different, especially when practitioners disagree about what those differences are. Such is the case with new historicism and cul‑ tural criticism. As we’ll see, these two fields share so much common theoretical ground that their approaches to literary interpretation are often quite similar. For the sake of clarity, however, and in order to fully appreciate the differences that do exist between new historicism and cultural criticism, we will begin by discussing the two fields separately. And because new historicists have articu‑ lated their theoretical premises more thoroughly than have cultural critics, we’ll