I really like the closing metaphor in this essay, which demonstrates that iconoclasm profanes institutions that have great value.
You are actually giving me flashbacks to grad school. I chose to write my (never completed) dissertation on Defoe, because I didn’t really like his books much and knew it would be much easier to “deconstruct” and subvert them. It would have been too depressing to do that to Henry James, or Jane Austen, or Samuel Johnson, or one of my other beloved authors. But isn’t it revealing that grad school encouraged me to think this way?
And isn’t it limiting too? To take your opening example, from Romeo and Juliet, I have no doubt that Shakespeare intended the double entendre. (I know, I know, authorial intention.) His plays are full of these double entendres, which enrich their meanings. These are young men, after all, and they are trying to prove their masculinity by perpetuating this ridiculous and deadly feud. Their swords are a symbol of that masculinity. But how boring to say that the only acceptable way to read the scene is to say it’s about gay sex. Ok, now what? And so what? The theory professors who wanted us to subvert every text were themselves imposing a new orthodoxy, and one that is much less interesting than what came before.
I really like the closing metaphor in this essay, which demonstrates that iconoclasm profanes institutions that have great value.
You are actually giving me flashbacks to grad school. I chose to write my (never completed) dissertation on Defoe, because I didn’t really like his books much and knew it would be much easier to “deconstruct” and subvert them. It would have been too depressing to do that to Henry James, or Jane Austen, or Samuel Johnson, or one of my other beloved authors. But isn’t it revealing that grad school encouraged me to think this way?
And isn’t it limiting too? To take your opening example, from Romeo and Juliet, I have no doubt that Shakespeare intended the double entendre. (I know, I know, authorial intention.) His plays are full of these double entendres, which enrich their meanings. These are young men, after all, and they are trying to prove their masculinity by perpetuating this ridiculous and deadly feud. Their swords are a symbol of that masculinity. But how boring to say that the only acceptable way to read the scene is to say it’s about gay sex. Ok, now what? And so what? The theory professors who wanted us to subvert every text were themselves imposing a new orthodoxy, and one that is much less interesting than what came before.