Criticism in style: Theory as aesthetic form (Alexander Pope, Edgar Allan Poe, Marxist)

Much recent criticism has emphasized the performative or literary dimension of critical language, either disparagingly or with encouragement. In each of the eight chapters in this thesis I clarify select details of this interrelationship. I begin with Shakespeare, and I suggest that Shakespeare's plays are already performing certain issues of fundamental importance to contemporary literary theory, and that by so doing constitute a necessary limit for the discourse. Two of these three chapters are also readings of Paul de Man, and here I explore in detail the relation between the language of deconstruction and the strategies of representation employed by Shakespeare in plays like Othello and Julius Caesar. The other chapter continues the investigation of criticism's relation to Shakespeare as it is expressed in the new historicism.; "Literary criticism," of course, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, to use one of its own terms. In the second part of the thesis I take this contradiction literally and develop moments of exchange and complementarity between figurative and hermeneutic modes of discourse, considering, in three chapters, three separate moments of convergence: translation; the place of the caesura in Pope's "Essay on Criticism"; and the critical reception of Wordsworth's poem "Yew-Trees." Any reading of a literary work brings its argument to a certain point, but I am more interested in keeping it there, at a certain point, the turning point in any reading beyond which it is no longer possible to appropriate a work without, like Borges' Pierre Menard, reproducing it.; In the last two chapters, I develop the ideological implications of readings in which the performative dimension of critical discourse is foregrounded. The first of these chapters is a reading of Adorno and popular music, the second a reading of Poe's "The Purloined Letter." Marxist literary critics regularly assail the emphasis in recent critical theory on performative discourse, and on a model of language that undermines the distinction between language and reality. But Marx himself is very much to the contrary when he writes that "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."...