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The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard Levin
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Abstract

The Death of the Author creates a hermeneutic vacuum that must be filled by some other determinant of meaning. For many of the new Marxist critics of Shakespeare, this author surrogate is a universal law of textual behavior. The text becomes an enemy that adopts various strategies (displacing the real subject, concealing contradictions, offering an imaginary resolution, etc.) to trick us into accepting its hegemonic ideology, but it always manages to expose and defeat itself. This construction of the text serves the political professions of these critics, since it enables them to wage—and win—a war against the forces of evil represented by the textual project and thus to act out in this displaced arena their “commitment” to transform society. Many feminist neo-Freudian critics of Shakespeare use a similar universal law wherein the text's masculine project (or fantasy) is always subverted by a feminine subtext, often embodied in an absent but omnipresent mother.

Type
Special Topic: The Politics of Critical Language
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , May 1990 , pp. 491 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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