In the first two weeks of our studies, New Criticism and variations of structuralism and deconstruction largely removed the author and the reader from our critical view. We had just the text. Over the last couple weeks we have slowly returned to the reader (reader response) and the author (psychoanalytic criticism). Now we turn, or perhaps return, to context. How do cultural and historical contexts of the texts we study, and of the people doing the studying, matter in literary interpretation and criticism?

We get a rich and complex exploration of that question in the critical example we are reading for Tuesday’s class, “The Classroom in the Canon: T. S. Eliot’s Modern English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The Sacred Wood.”

Their scholarship and book in progress, The Teaching Archive, has its own archive of materials [linked]. This example gives us a way to do some further thinking about a point made by Tyson, identified as “self-positioning”: “the inevitability of personal bias makes it imperative that new historicists be as ware of and as forthright as possible about their own psychological and ideological positions relative to the material they analyze so that their readers can have some idea of the human ‘lens’ through which they are viewing the historical issues at hand” (275).

As Kenneth Burke puts it, “Every way of seeing is a way of not seeing.” I see this problem of “self-positioning” as both a useful insight with regard to new historicism and cultural studies, and one of its constraints or limits. Critics need to qualify their vision regarding the lenses they are using. That’s a good thing, and can strengthen the argumentation and persuasion, to the extend that we critics thereby engage our readers in the work we do. We can be more deliberate in the lenses we use. The potential limit is that in the end we need and want our readers to see what we see. We can’t qualify things beyond recognition. We can’t proclaim our own interpretation invalid because it is not free of bias. Or, we can’t do that and expect our readers to be persuaded of our reading. Which, in the end, is the goal. That’s my bias, I recognize: all critical reading and writing are thoroughly rhetorical. The aim is not certainty or objectivity. It is persuasive plausibility.

I think Buurma and Heffernan achieve this, a persuasively plausible argument for rewriting and revaluing the “received idea of the Eliotic canon” by way of reconstructing and recovering the pedagogical and collaborative contexts of his essays collected in The Sacred Wood. As part of their argument, they are thinking and positioning their own scholarship in relation to the archive of teaching.

Why am I persuaded? What am I not entirely seeing? Perspectives from new historicism can help me answer both questions, and that will enable me to strengthen my argument, even as it keeps me from providing final and certain answers.

As I look to the seminar projects (and elevator pitches) you have begun to entertain, I wonder what role history and culture have played thus far in your studies in English, and what you might do differently, or additionally, with a better grasp on these critical concepts from new historicism and cultural criticism. Are you interested in a new historical lens? What will that enable you to see? What will it keep you from seeing?