ABSTRACT
There is always a danger that a radical literary criticism will simply create a new canon of acceptable texts, merely reversing old value judgements, rather than questioning their fundamental assumptions, as did, for instance, New Criticism (see Chapter 2). In arguing that the interrogative text enlists the reader in contradiction, while classic realism does its best to efface contradiction, I do not mean to suggest that the interrogative text is therefore ‘good’ and classic realism ideological, misleading and therefore ‘bad’. But if we are not simply to subject ourselves (in every sense) to ideology, we need a new way of approaching classic realism.
