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masking function; now we arc told that it is the texts themselves
which must be unmasked.
It may well be that those of us who began teaching in the sixties
were all too ready to extract a subversive outlook from every work we
examined, too eager to impose a problematic, modernist viewpoint on
the writings of the past. We were quick to discount the politics of au–
thors, the limitations of the times, so that we could find our own poli–
tics in all the books we loved. Trained in the New Criticism, we could
show how each book escaped its author and subverted its own message.
Now, of course, the new historicists and ideology critics have reversed
this approach with a vengeance: every author is guilty until proven inno–
cent, every book reflects the ideological currents of its moment, the dis–
tributions of power, the circulation of social energy. Nothing is more
suspect than the autonomy of the aesthetic, which is seen as little more
than an ideology of the bourgeois era.
Conservative critics respond by taking aesthetic values for granted, as
if every effort to connect art with history were a leftist plot, a renewal
of Stalinism. They are given to sonorous generalities and unquestioned
assumptions about Western thought, as when Roger Kimball writes:
The multiculturalist imperative explicitly denies the intellectual and
moral foundations of Western culture - preeminently its commit–
ment to rationality and the ideal of objectivity - and .. conse–
quently the idea of being "students of Western culture and multicul–
turalism at the same time" is either an empty rhetorical gesture or a
contradiction in terms.
The quoted words are from Catharine Stimpson's MLA presidential
address, in which she tried to balance the claims of multiculturalism and
the Western tradition. Such a strategy pleases no one, for nothing is
more alien to polemicists on both sides than the notion that Western
culture has always been porous: an open grid that has continuously inte–
grated and assimilated other cultures.
As John Foster Dulles used to attack the nonaligned bloc in the
1950s, insisting that there was no third way between Communism and
the West, conservatives like Kramer are contemptuous of efforts to
"occupy some liberal middle ground that . . . simply does not exist"; in
other words,
to
define a liberal multiculturalism, acknowledging - in–
deed, celebrating - the complex cultural weave of American life. On the
left there are many who denigrate pluralism in the same way. In a recent
issue of
Critical Inquiry,
Michael Geyer notes with alarm how new hiring
