An Essay in Reactive Criticism
Thomas J. Tobin

The literature classroom has become, over the past decade or so, an increasingly joyless place in which to study. With the death of the author, the rise of différance, the advent of deconstruction, and the havoc of post-colonial nomenclature, the function of literature--and even of language itself--has been subverted. Instead of literature, we seem to be studying linguistics, semantics, and logic in our English departments today. Indeed, we are teaching our upper-level undergraduates and graduate students that, at its most fundamental level, literature bears no relation to social events, the lives of its readers, the lives of those who wrote it (we can no longer call them authors), and even to itself. 
If we talk of literature as the Edwardians did of automatic “spirit writing”--as ecriture, as a mechanical process only--then we rule out the primary intended function of all literature: to at least inform its readers, and often to influence them. To use a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but one which will illustrate what I see as the main problem with the state of literary criticism today, allow me to turn to the erection of a building. 
In the Kantian sense, there is the concept of “to build,” just as “authorship” is understood as being the relationship of I who write to that which I have written. There is also a builder, just as the author undeniably exists in some fashion (whether with, or apart from, the text he or she has produced).  Finally, there is the building, the book or essay or poem, itself. Each of these concepts is connected to the other, often--though not necessarily--in a logical or chronological way. They all relate to the way in which we think of an edifice. Each aspect informs on the others, and enriches our own understanding of what a building is, what writing is. 
If we look at the construction of a building in the way we now study literature, we are left with no building at all. The process by which the edifice is built becomes construxion, because of the more subtle nuance of the French word. The architect, the workers, and those who pay for the structure to be built--say, the authorial, social, and political factors of its creation--all become irrelevant to the finished product. We cannot call it a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Even the purpose of the building becomes irrelevant once it is built; be it bank, hospital, or house, it is merely the interplay of beams, girders, studs, supports, gypsum board and paint. We may not even properly call it a “building” anymore, but a dynamic relationship among its constituent parts, none of which, by the way, we are ever able to precisely define. Thus, we are finally left with a strange definition of “building”: a construct made up of those things which we assume to be those things which are signified when we use the imperfect signifiers of the names of its materials. 
It is this paralyzing uncertainty that is slowly confusing the daylights out of our students. We tell them, on the one hand, that their term papers and scholarly research should present readers with a defensible thesis, one which is novel and supported by copious amounts of relevant evidence. The burden of proof, in the most elementary sense, weighs heavily on most of the practical day-to-day applications of classroom literary critical products. At the same time, we also teach our students that there are no such things as finite meaning or narrative, that logic is a shadow construct imbued with undesirable dead-white-Western-male ideology, that the events of an author’s life do not relate to his or her work, and that even the concepts of language and meaning are misleading chimæras--imprecise and impossible to clearly define.
My question, ultimately, is if these things are true--and I agree with many of them, incidentally--how can we justify our jobs as teachers of literature? If there is nothing to study, no relationship between literature and society, nothing to be learned from literature, why do we still receive paychecks? I posit that logic, conclusiveness, and definition can coexist with the divorce of the author from the text, the play of language with itself, deconstruction, and the post-colonial politically correct “exploding canon,” if we accept--not without difficulty--a few assumptions about the nature and purpose of literature. I call these tenets of literature Reactive criticism, not because I am attempting to eradicate the ideas of theorists whose work post-dates a certain year, but because I see no schism between the theories of, say, Roland Barthes in 1986 and the noted "progressivist" critic Cosmo Monkhouse in 1886.
Reactive criticism depends necessarily on the support, refutation, or modification of pre-existing arguments; indeed, it embodies a conservative desire to return to a single-canon view of literature written in a given language, in this case English. The weltanschauung of Reactive criticism encompasses modern critical theories, while at the same time preserving the usefulness of these theories to the professor and his or her students in the practical, every-day tasks of the literature classroom. The four principles of Reactionaryism may thus be most easily demonstrated in replies to--and modifications of--the theories Barthes, Derrida, Michael Ryan, and Edward Said.
Barthes
• Author-function and text a re both texts. It is an interesting distinction to make, and linguistically sound, butr practically irrelevant.
• Hemingway's short stories
• Yeats and Maud Gonne, symbo-mythology
Derrida
• differance does exist, sign/signifi(ed, er) relationship is lingusitically so, but if logic doesn't exist per se, then how can Derrida communicate his own findings? If this were really so, it would be as the Cabalistic mystery of the ineffable: The name of Yaweh as the unpronounceable name, the dark mystery. Try telling that to your professor the next time you hand in something late.
• Most speech/writing need not be exact, anyway. Rowan Atkinson in Black Adder saying "we are as different as, as. . . as two dissimilar things, in a pod." When specificity is needed, we hunt out the closest word which can convey our meaning. As long as everyone shares the nearly the same system of lexicon, there is no problem. It is not the barefoot field-goal kicker who causes a problem on the football field. It is the player who brings a hockey stick.
• It is okay to think of "ecriture" as the writing process--the mental machinations plus the encoding process plus the transmission of ideas.
• D. T Suzuki on Zen. English and most other languages are plurally meaningful; there is a n overabundance of words with nearly the same meanings. The idea of "nuance" is something which Differance does not take into account.
Michael Ryan
• Deconstruction=essential impossibility of first principles. Fictiveness of seamless reality. 
• Again, the establishemnt of norms and agreed-upon fictions is the basis of "sophia," of knowledge. Although this is inherently dead-white-male-centric, it is the dominant hieratical system in place now. The Intro Freshman writing class is not ready for this, nor are publishers, or many of the writers of theory themselves: Ryan on p. 33 even resorts to summary, logical organization, and reiteration in order to make himself understood--in an essay on how the logics of identity, unity, and homogeneity are false.
Edward Said
 • Post-colonialism is an exercise in inclusion, and is to be lauded. However, the Lacanian aspect of the Other is emphasized over the Kantian definition of the "other:" that which is not, or has not been included. The idea of inclusion is a noble one, but to say that the canon ought to be changed is an archaeological heresy. We do not say that a distinct culture is at fault if it prefers its own weltanscauung.
• The idea that the messages of one culture are valuable to another is nothing new. The inclusion of all writers in English (or French, or Esperanto, for that matter) into one canon negates the purpose of setting up boundaries. There is no excuse for segregation by race, gender, or other limiting features. However, there is something to be said for the division of literature into periods or other untis which put together similar themes, genders, or important characteristics. In the case of writers from past generations, this means accepting--and not passing judgement on--the socio-politico-economical limitations of such thnigs as institutional chauvinism, slavery, and the suppression of other kinds of maginalized voices. That these voices are finally receiving recognition is good; to give them primacy from a misguided notion of "making up for" their long absence is dangerous. 
• We should encourage our students to address the problems inherent in the dead-white-male canonical view of much of literary history, but we should also teach them to accept that history as having happened.