/lit/ - Literature

How can we know what a book is about before reading it? And why must all literature be about the same thing? Namely, class, gender, and race? What reason could be found for reading the content of different works to one issue? How could this severe narrowing of content be justified? Ordinarily, when we pick up a book we have not read,we assume we are about to become familiar with its content. Race-gender-class critics, however, seem to know in advance. And if criticism is to be reduced to results that are largely predicable before we even begin, what is the point of it?

The race-gender-class program claims that criticism should not be concerned primarily with the content of a literary work-- its unique stamp, the individual meaning that makes it unlike any other work, the specific qualities that make readers return to it again and again. But it is puzzling to think that any valid form of literary criticism would not be centrally concerned with such things. What, then can the point of race-gender-class criticism be?

This type of criticism puts works of literature on ideological trial by measuring them against "correct" attitudes toward race, gender, and class found wanting or not. For example, a race-gender-class critic looking at gender roles in Grimm's Fairy Tales will find boys and girls reflect the sexual stereotypes of the time-- which are of course bad. Nothing has been achieved by reading the book this way, as every book from that time period will contain the same sexual stereotypes. What the critic has done amounts to nothing of significance because the critic has only said that the Grimms wrote in the early nineteenth century.