ABSTRACT
Without denying evidence to the contrary, I would argue that literary criticism today is still interesting and even instructive. Admittedly, on occasion the fi eld is muddied by convoluted prose, and a tendency to ignore historical evidence to make way for moral hectoring and psychosexual political attitudinizing. Sometimes credulity takes the place of healthy skepticism. As we have seen in the last chapter, even sophisticated critics like A. D. Nuttall take psychoanalytic theory seriously, confi dent in their belief that its canons apply to literary analysis (although, it seems to me, it is never made clear who would treat whom for what symptoms for how long). By no means all of these critics, but a signifi cant few hold nothing sacred except their project of demystifying whatever tradition reveres. Shakespeare’s standing in the world is the relevant case in point. These critics, sometimes called “social constructionists,” would raze to common ground any and all literary works that history’s extraordinary praise has elevated above the status toward which, as Erwin Panofsky would have it, all works of art inevitably move, namely toward that of a lifeless document (Panofsky 10-24).1
