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Further Debate about “Bardicide”

standing (a well-known locus of this is of course de Man’s “Rhetoric of Temporality”). Apparent or ostensible meanings can indeed be proved wrong in reading—most obviously, for example, in the structure of a detective story. Levin scorns a rhetorical effect of texts. Levin mocks the “ventriloquized” moves of these younger critics, particularly that a text might have a “project” or “function.” But don’t texts have rhetorical ends, even if only for entertainment? or for education or acculturation? As a case in point, the common genre of the family sitcom offers amusement and, beyond that, presents a distinct cultural model that is anything but innocent or neutral. Sitcoms advertise the values of the nuclear family, of bourgeois consumption (in the clothes, houses, and concerns of the characters, as well as the incessant train of commercials), and of traditional gender and sexual roles (the women are still usually misty-eyed about babies, and male roommates are always “buddies,” not lovers). For that matter, what is the function of teaching a Shakespeare play, say, to students in the middle-class suburbs of Long Island, as Levin does? Not simply to teach reading but to give them what Bourdieu calls “cultural capital,” at the least. Levin proves intentionalism by default. Levin says, rather acerbically, that it is a “curious thing” that Shakespeare has disappeared (491). Why? This observation begs the argument and implicitly states Levin’s intentionalist faith. The ghost behind Levin’s stance is E. D. Hirsch, whom Levin cites explicitly in his New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979) and who posits a single ascertainable authorial intention. Levin seems scandalized that the new “critics maintain . . . that there is no ‘unmediated’ access to the text ‘in itself’ and that all interpretations of it are ‘appropriations’ determined by the interpreter’s political position . . .” (492). Since Levin finds this to be a fallacy, does he indeed have unmediated access to Shakespeare’s texts? If he does, he should surely tell us. And does he deny that one’s position determines one’s interpretation? or that one’s position entails some sort of politics? His stand here is as the plain-talking literalist sheriff, keeping Shakespeare safe for humanity. And that position does entail consequences, which affect, if not national politics directly, certainly professional politics, departmental politics, the curriculum, book publishing, students, and so forth. All this is not to say that Levin’s analysis is without value. His highlighting of the figures of this criticism— the personification of the text, the use of military terms like strategy and tactics, and the trope of the text performing mechanistically—are surely worth further examination. And his analysis of the institutional placement or predicament of these historicist readings—that they enact a kind of (textual) class warfare that their critical arguments are fixed to win and that offers a fantasy resolution (500)—is intriguing and bears on current discussion of the profession of theory. Nevertheless, finally, the thrust of his argument— that criticism has no political effect—is disturbing and disempowering. The university is not an immune zone of culture but a significant site of ideological (re)production and struggle (indeed, for Althusser, schools are the dominant ideological apparatus). I would hope that one can have an effect, however humble, through various tasks and interventions there.