I never meant that people here didn’t understand the complexities—I wasn’t trying to offend any Freepers. I just hear my own area of expertise attacked often as being “outdated” and that literature is constantly moving forward, so we need to lump past epochs of literature into one massive conglomeration.
Someone in my field is expected to know 1,000 years of medieval lit and history and you’d damn well better know Renaissance lit and dabble in some other area as well.
Yes, a lot of literature is based off of Marxist literature, but really only in the last one hundred years or so. There have also been many reactions against Marx. I am a staunch New Historicist (as many medieval scholars are—it may be a dead critical theory in other eras of literature, but not for us), so I reject Marx by default as anachronistic. I also reject feminist theory on the same grounds. Anyways, a bit of a rant, but I do think that canonical works are canonical for a reason. With that said, I am more conservative than many of my liberal colleagues who completely reject putting literature into some sort of categorical chronology. Accepting canonical works of literature is a decidedly conservative stance to take.
However, so many of the English and Literature people that I have met seem to think that if you say that you don't like a certain book, or a certain writer, then you must not understand it. Maybe, maybe not.
But at least we understand enough to know that the writer is trying to offend everything that we believe, so why waste time being miserable? Life's too short. Unless we are still searching for the answer. I've found it, at least for me.
On another note, what do the New Historicists think, what are their theories??