{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03574580759046778, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00706090026478376, 'mean_word_length': 4.625310173697271, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Class, Gender, Pleasure, and Criticism

Richard Levin’s “The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide” (105 [1990]: 491-504) makes wicked fun of what this reader-response critic terms the text-active position. Levin points out the absurdities of critics’ claims to the “real meaning” of a text. He shows the pretentiousness of the pretense to an absolute, god’s-eye view of what a text does or is. He punctures the claim that we can step out of the mortal psychological processes of perception and interpretation that necessarily produce any critic’s reading. Levin targets those who premise The Death of the Author and substitute an active, projecting, strategizing, revealing, concealing text for the lost bard. I think he makes it clear, however, that the same anomalies and pretensions appear when more traditional critics claim “objective knowledge of the real meaning of a text” (499). Levin’s critique thus calls down—I hesitate to say it—a Shakespearean plague on both houses. He leaves us with the ever-daunting question, Where do we go from here? I suggest that the beginning of wisdom is frankly to acknowledge a different “project of the text.” The real purpose of all these readings, formalist-humanist or anti-formalist-humanist, is that their authors may publish and not perish. (From this point of view, Levin might note, the authors he cites are very much in existence, indeed somewhat frantically so.) We can begin by granting that the primary aim of literary criticism as we know it today is publication and all the rewards that publication brings. If so, then what might we publish if we were to give up our claims to superhuman objectivity? We would, of course, have to acknowledge our own activity in our criticism, but greater critics than we have done so. Indeed it was customary until recent decades. We might, for example, express opinions. We might point to things to admire or condemn. We might conduct a dialogue with a text. We might parody, we might contest the text, or we might engage the author in a conversation as some historians today engage their subjects. In short, we might try for a little more imagination in our publishing than either the old or the new New Critics show. Levin’s witty expose points, if not the only way, one way.