Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text

Abstract

Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text Janet Sarbanes My paper will formulate a model for reading literary texts written either at the inception or as a continuation of the politics of subjectivity that nineteen-fifties came into existence in the United States in the organized around racial, advocate rights, representation and, in some instances, revolution. Like many literary texts and theories of language of the postmodern era, these texts treat politics and language as inextricably intertwined, though their primary aim is not so much to dismantle the dominant discourse as to generate minor political subjectivities. sixties, a politics and gender and sexual identities to From a poststructuralist critical perspective, these texts often appear unreadable because they approach the intersection of politics, identity and textuality differently than other literary or for that matter, philosophical texts. The language of these texts is the language of force, polemic and struggle, rather than the langue of domination, structure and empire. It is also the language of the body, not as text, but as vehicle for transforming individual subjectivity into group subjectivity. With their construction of the felt or lived body as the vital link between language and material- ity, individual and collective, politics and literature, these writers which not merely subverts but in certain instances defies the sociolinguistic rules of the create a discourse of the other-as-other I am reading after must also refer to the revolution in our understanding of subjectivity wrought by the dominant discourse. The revolution Western metaphysical and literature in unprec- edented ways. Vincent Pecora summarizes the subversive legacy poststructuralists, whose critique of the tradition connected politics, philosophy of poststructuralism in terms of its critique of essentialism, the argument that stable identities are in effect linguistic fictions or its historical constructions; critique of representation, the insis- tence that language is not neutral or fixed but slanted and unstable; and its critique of utilitarianism and instrumental thinking