Letters to the Editor
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Literature and Critics
I find myself wanting to defend the feminists, marxists, deconstructionists, et. al., not because I necessarily agree with them, but because those they replaced were far worse. I am speaking about generations of upper class critics who based their readings on their own personal taste. There may be battles in the academy conducted by power seeking dimwits, but as far as I know the artists have always been separate from the academics. Writing and studying writing are two very different things. Writers see wholistically and critics see from theoretical perspectives. At least the new dimwits base their ideas on something other than what side of the bed they got up on. They have opened new possibilities of meaning and understanding in spite of their sometimes harsh rhetoric. The idea of reading because we love literature is more difficult to discuss than deconstruction. Do I fall in love first and then marry, or do I follow my grandfather's advice: first comes marriage, then comes love. William Meredith wrote that pictures are hard to see, music is hard to hear, poetry is hard to read, and people are hard to love. I believe he meant for critics to be included in the people category.