Gary Locke
The last 100 or so years of academic literary criticism have been spectacularly heterogeneous. A century that began with dons arguing about Chaucer’s verbs as if their lives were at stake and showering one another with Festschriften ended with Jonathan Goldberg’s famous essay ‘The Anus in Coriolanus.’ The same poem by, say, Marvell might, depending upon whom one reads, be a dry, delicious repository of philological knowledge or a helpful data point for those interested in the history of bourgeois exploitation. It might be “about” almost anything: the bliss of prelapsarian man, trees, nothing.
