Criticism: Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, & Dear Old Marxie!

My Dearest Scattered Erstwhile Missourians,

Greetings from the hollowed-out bowl (or rind, perhaps far more aptly) that is the sorrow middle of this rapidly dissolving week-end. I hope and wish with all fervency of soul that all is well out across the oblivion of space/anxiety/various forms of cable & wire that connects our lives, and I am bringing to that illusive collective "we" a rather simple question which shan't be phrased until I attempt to rend it so, and which is vexing in all possible ways. Something in me whispers that this will hearken back to many of the fundamental abstraction v. concrete reality discussion that bubbled & steamed & hissed its way under several of our PubSpeaks discussions and loftier (or perhaps not lofty at all! Shame on my loose semantics, aye?) midnight ++ reelings.

So let me give it one frail attempt:

I have been reading a rather strange Philip Roth novel stolen (quite inadvertently! Sort of!) from the local library, which has been lingering on my shelf between the untouched American History tomes and the Ancient Greeks and the pop culture criticism works for that silly (and by that I mean illustrious!) OSU course. I believe that I have some gnawing tendency to canonize even when I don't understand anything of the breadth or nature of the canon, so I had naturally prioritized all of those unread shelved darlings in my mind, and Camus and Thoreau (despite Adam & Jake's ardent warnings!) and Achebe and the like were lined up beforehand. But I don't like to adhere to order, and the workings of my mind make far less sense than I would like to assert the effort to investigate, so I selected the Roth, and have been endlessly perplexed ever since.

To cut to the quick of things--the Roth novel centers on the University of Iowa/ U. Chicago literary scene and the life of professors of English at midcentury. And several cryptic but jarring debates between critical schools have come up in Roth's accounts of faculty meanings. I have swooned a bit to think that I am without a doubt greatly enamored of the English language and that whole brimming canon (whatever it may be) of books and texts and aesthetic folderol--

But I know absolutely nothing of literary criticism.
How much value, do you think, should one give to established schools of thought?
And I suppose that this doesn't just apply to aesthetics, if we consider criticism to be such.
It's philosophy, too, and theology.
I have run into a good deal of these schools (especially Derrida, in my work on horror vacui
during that horrible week during the summer), and have been charmed by the rather complex taxonomy and the implicit horrors of mapping out the lines between Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic School (egad!?) and Pragmatism and Whatever-in-Hades Bloom in doing over at Amy Lee University--but does it boil down to anything?
Forgive me if I seem aghast; I only attempt to question because it confuses me greatly.
Who reads all of this criticism, and furthermore, who can chart it all, save the critics themselves? I'd read some of Terry Eagleton before (apparently a very well established Marxist critic) for a thesis on the function of the tragic for 9th Grade Humanities, and like most moderately literate kids who get their kicks adverbially, have devoured all of the criticism at the end of the Norton Critical Edition and know Bloom & Joyce Carol Oates and the like.

But how can one ever know all of it?
And in the end, building from that tabula rosa of ignorance, does one really gain
anything? If all of those schools of thought exist in perfect binary opposition--like the struggle between the empiricists and rationalists, yes?--isn't everything negated by the fact that all possibilities are presented?

Q: What is the purpose of attempting to pin or pull a purpose from literature?
QII: Why must we write?

This is all quite mad.

And pleaseplease, excuse me for being so plodding and unintelligible with all of this,
or for promising something and delivering only some well-nigh inscrutable obfuscation
of four days plus of convulted thought. I would just be incredibly curious to see what sort
of debate or advice or opinions, if any, that this sparks.

And the Michigan TASPers (Hello, Hello! I know that you are as sneaky and largely obsessive as I!) have taught me a good word: reification!, which seems to fit in well with my droll list of pet words used only to batter/confound bystanders or to help in the construction of largely spineless aesthetic frameworks. A bit like our love for "rectifying" things, yesyes?


Give me answers, loves!
Or questions, at least, because I am feeling so very lost in all of this.
Perhaps engineering is the solution to everything.
And I do not kid, either.

With Earnestness (as always) and a Bit Too Much Stolen Time,
The Midwestern Moralist / Misdirected Scrivener.