Balkan Studies | Info

An Era of Inclusion

With the advances in feminist and civil rights issues in the middle of the last century, it also seemed natural to question tradition in other areas, including approaches to the study of literature. Why should the field be dominated by works written largely by dead white males? What about works by women? Minorities? Those still living?

With the best of intentions, educators and literary critics opened the field. The effect has been two-fold. First, literary studies have become more about ideology than about art. This development has led the literary critic Harold Bloom to identify what he bitingly calls the School of Resentment (which includes Feminists, Marxists, New Historicists, and Deconstructionists, among others). Students of literature can no longer study novels, plays and poetry without also studying the writings of these theorists.

The second effect has been that the playing field has been levelled in terms of aesthetic form. If there is value in studying Shakespeare, the argument goes, why not the Broadway musical? Why should Wordsworth’s lyric poems be privileged over the lyrics of Madonna’s hits?

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