Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 09:49:47 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Greenblatt [was Anyone get Gass?]


David Langston wrote:
 
> But, I'm supposing you already believe this and are trying to figure out
> why Mr. Gass and others like him dismiss criticism and critical theory
> altogether.
> 
> Sometimes they are simply dismissing bad criticism....and it is sad but
> true that much of the time there is something to dismiss.  However, I
> find many of those dismissive gestures to be fairly puny because they
> rest their case on a few bad examples and then globalize their negative
> judgments about the sad state of criticism.   I don't find it very
> persuasive work.

	We're on the same wave length here. Indeed, the sort of sloppy generalizations
that Gass makes would, I think, have posed problems to his advancement through
graduate school.  So I'm sort of amazed that he's even on a "B" list of critics.

> 
> Are you pursuing Mr. Gass's ideas because you have already exhausted more
> interesting lines of thought?  Or did he come highly recommended?  I can
> think of dozens of people whose work I would put ahead of his for
> finding out the state of literary criticism.


	I just happen to have heard his name crop up in several different contexts (I
think the NYRB had an add for a new book of his, replete with qvetchy quotes by
him) and was thinking that I should learn a little bit about him.  But I'll take
you comment as sanction to move on to someone else in my panoply of the Barely
or Unknown.  
	At the top of that list (for perhaps random reasons) is Stephen Greenblatt. 
I've read some Greenblatt, and for the most part like him, but I've always been
a bit puzzled by his slamming of deconstruction.  Namely, I always get the
feeling that he sets up a deconstructive straw man where he should find in
deconstruction an ally.  He seems to misread deconstruction in almost the exact
same way that Foucault does, perhaps even more so, in making of, say Derrida, a
theoretician-contra-material/historical reality, or some sort of neo-Hegelian
hermeneute.  Amazingly Greenblatt seems to accuse Derrida of not considering the
specificities of texts closely enough (it is Derrida he has in mind when he
talks about deconstruction, isn't it?).  But maybe I'm not reading him correctly
here.  Can anyone cast me a "rote Faden" to help me navigate through Greenblatt?

Ciao,
Reg


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