A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts

Abstract

PPEALING PARTICULARLY to generation still in the process of divorcing from the New Critics' habit of bracketing off any text as an entity in itself, as though could be read, understood, criticized entirely in its own terms,1 Harold Bloom has proposed dialectical theory of influence between poets poets, as well as between which, in essence, does away with the static notion of fixed or knowable text. As he argued in A Map of Misreading in 1975, a poem is response to poem, as poet is response to poet, or person to his parent. Thus, for Bloom, poems ... are neither about 'subjects' nor about 'themselves.' They are necessarily about other poems.2 To read or to know poem, according to Bloom, engages the reader in an attempt to map the psychodynamic relations by which the poet at hand has willfully misunderstood the work of some precursor (either single or composite) in order to correct, rewrite, or appropriate the prior poetic vision as his own. As first introduced in The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, the resultant wholly different practical criticism ... give[s] up the failed enterprise of seeking to 'understand' any single poem as an entity in pursue[s] instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet's deliberate misinterpretation, as poet, of precursor poem or of poetry in general.3 What one deciphers in the process of reading, then, is not any discrete entity but, rather, complex relational event, itself synecdoche for larger whole including other texts.4 Reading text is necessarily the reading of whole system of texts, Bloom explains in Kabbalah Criticism, and meaning is always wandering around between texts (KC, pp. 107-8). To help purchase assent for this wholly different practical criticism, Bloom asserted an identity between critics poets as coequal participants in the same belated all-but-impossible act of reading (which, as he hastens to explain in A Map of Misreading, if strong is always misreading-p. 3). As it is drama of epic proportions, in Bloom's terms, when the ephebe poet attempts to appropriate