Ideology, Antisemitism, and Chaucer's Prioress's Tale

Abstract

Today most literary critics assume that their prior philosophical, sociopolitical, ethnic, or religious commitments--their "ideologies" in the broader and non-pejorative sense of the term (discussed below)--will always, at least to some degree, determine their critical approaches to the various works of art they study--works of art which are, in turn, now also always assumed to be more or less explicitly "ideological." This axiom, which says that a critic's ideology always determines his or her critical stance toward any work of art, which is, in turn, also always necessarily ideological, has turned out to be less disabling than one might have expected; and often even the reverse seems to be the case. We have learned to live comfortably with this view of how our disparate ideological prejudices influence our critical practice because, as influential American critics like Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, and Stephen Greenblatt have argued, once we have acknowledged that ideological commitments of one sort or another are always to some extent part of the baggage we bring to our readings of works of literature, we can then decide to choose our ideological commitments, make them explicit, and perhaps even share them with an expanding community of like-minded readers. When we do this, we find that old pieties like "Christian-humanist values" or "secular-humanist values," the immutable canonicity of the "Great Books of the Western World," and various other class, gender, and race-based essentialist ideologies become easier to purge than we had feared.