Arguing for All It's Worth

The rebirth of ideology in contemporary criticism can safely be considered commonplace. If one were looking for way to describe contemporary American literary and cultural studies, one could scarcely do better than associate it not, as in Daniel Bell's phrase, with the 'end of ideology,' but rather with its rebirth.' Peter Brooks claims that recent criticism is best described as a reassertion of the historical and ideological; even deconstructionists have turned themselves into practitioners of ideological and cultural critique.2 That old notion of aesthetic form, the argument runs, masked significant historical-material relations: Is not, after all, the real subject of literary study ideology, the real purpose political transformation? ... In the current critical scene, literature is all too often demeaned, the aesthetic experience denigrated or reduced to mystified ideology.3 Marjorie Levinson agrees: critic should resist any traditional overarching aesthetic unity which might furnish such misleading holistic understandings. Hence, in her view, invoking aesthetics only distracts one from the more important politics of literature. A responsible critic, Levinson believes, should set image against idea, form against content, process against product, in the hope that we may thus compel tired organic apparition [aesthetic unityl to reveal its (emphasis in original).4 But what exactly is revealed when an aesthetic fabulous is exposed? I contend that such fusions actually disclose ideal dynamic relationships that inherently participate in the ideological interpretations of America's multicultural canon. The metaphor of Romantic fusion underpins type of formalism that allows us to argue about ideologies in the first place.s

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• Canons and Contexts

  Paul Lauter•Canons and contexts•1991

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• A Response to John Higham

  Open Access•Nancy A Hewitt•American Quarterly•1993

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