Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His ContemporariesThis book collects a number of Richard Levin's essays, beginning with his well-known PMLA article of 1988 on Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy and continuing through the 1990s, that examine and evaluate some of the most important aspects of the new critical approaches to the interpretations of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries- principally the New Historicism, feminism, and revisionist versions of Marxism and Freudianism. In these essays he is looking not only for rational arguments in these approaches, but also for a rational argument with their practitioners, and therefore he reprints several of the responses that these essays have elicited (including th PMLA Forum letter signed by twenty-four people who objected to Feminist Thematics) along with his answers to them, which contribute to this critique of the present state of the discourse in this field. |
Contents
| 9 | |
Concerning the Text | 25 |
Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy | 29 |
A LETTER TO THE PMLA FORUM | 49 |
The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide | 55 |
A LETTER TO THE PMLA FORUM | 73 |
ANOTHER LETTER TO THE PMLA FORUM | 77 |
Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English Renaissance Drama | 82 |
Negative Evidence | 131 |
The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism | 152 |
The New and the Old Historicizing of Shakespeare | 177 |
The Cultural Materialist Attack on Artistic Unity | 195 |
Silence Is Consent or Curse Ye Meroz | 210 |
The Politicized Language of Literary Criticism | 227 |
The Current Polarization of Literary Studies | 244 |
Notes | 259 |
MAKING SENSE | 94 |
ReThinking Unthinkable Thoughts | 104 |
Bashing the Bourgeois Subject | 114 |
ITS A PANIC | 122 |
Son of Bashing the Bourgeois Subject | 124 |
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Common terms and phrases
argue argument asserts assume assumptions attack audience Barker basic believe Belsey bourgeois capitalism cause characters claim concept conflict context contradictions course critical approaches cultural materialists Desdemona discipline discoveries discuss Dollimore earlier Elizabethan essay example explain fact feminist critics formalist formalist/humanist Freudian gender Goldberg Hamlet historical criticism Historicists historicizers human humanist idea ideology interdisciplinarity interpretation Jonathan Dollimore Jonathan Goldberg Kahn kind King Lear Levin liberal literary criticism literary text literature Macbeth Malcolm Evans male Marxists masculine McLuskie meaning Measure for Measure Midsummer Night's Dream negative evidence neo-Freudian never newer critics oppositional oppression Othello patriarchy play play's PMLA polarization political poststructuralist problem prove quoted radical readings Renaissance response says seems sense sexual Shakespeare Shakespearean tragedy silence Sinfield social society status quo thematic thematists theme theory tion topicalists tragedy tragic unity universal Unthinkable Thoughts usually women words