Eyeballs, Critical Lenses, and Cutting Onions

Like Caitlin, my earliest introduction to literary criticism also made use of the lens metaphor. Looking at a piece of literature through a specific critical lens allowed a reader to see things that were otherwise obscured. I find the metaphor helpful, but, as Caitlin pointed out with her comments on using multiple lenses, it does raise some false expectations about the nature of literary criticism. First, and I think most obviously, it gives the impression that before you put on a critical lens it is just you and your naked eyeballs encountering a text. Of course this is ridiculous. We are never unlensed readers. We always approach literature with some sort of interpretive framework. When we introduce our students to literary criticism I think that an ideal place to start is to talk about the critical lenses they already use when they approach a piece of literature. When you approach critical lenses with the understanding that we all are already wearing them, it becomes obvious that our critical lenses are always layered. If I put on a postmodern lens to look at a piece of literature I am really seeing it through both my own personal lens and through postmodernism.

Do any of you remember those “secret code” puzzles with the different colored letters? They used to be on the backs of cereal boxes. If you look at them with just your eyes it looks like a meaningless bunch of blue and red letters. When you put on the included red-lensed glasses, however, the red letters disappear and the blue letters turn into words. Critical lenses do the same thing. They let you see one element more clearly. What we don’t often recognize is that they clarify one element at the expense of another. There is too much going on in literature for us to notice it all at once. By noticing one element we are forced to ignore others. That’s why there are different schools of literary criticism: to draw attention to what other views are filtering out. When our students worry that “approaching literature with too critical an eye can ruin our appreciation of it” I think that they have a legitimate point (Anderson 346). If their appreciation of literature relies on noticing the red and we ask them to focus on the blue, of course that will change their enjoyment. A critical approach offers its own kind of enjoyment and some scholars are able to separate their criticism of literature from their enjoyment, but putting on a critical lens is not always strictly a matter of will and, as in “Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu” once on, a critical lens can be hard to take off again.

Which brings me to The Onion and what is so funny. As I read through the articles, I tried (in between the pain and laughter) to see patterns in the satire. I think a common thread is found in the disconnect between the values of students and the values of teachers and academics. They don’t speak the same languages. They don’t notice and value the same things in literature. The literature people are interested in themes of humanity and grammatical correctness and seeing cultural oppression in Burrito Bandito menus. Students are interested in burritos and steamy sex scenes and a quick emotional pay off and the grade. When a teacher tries to speak the student’s language as in “Shakespeare was, like, the ultimate rapper” or the student tries to speak the teacher’s language as in “Hilarious Hamlet Essay Circulated in Teacher’s Lounge” they fail miserably and face ridicule.

I don’t know quite how to respond to The Onion articles other than despair. After all, I not so secretly have thought some of the same things about the Academy and the discipline of literature in particular. It’s insular, jargony, designed to impress a very small in-crowd, and way to concerned with the minutia of language. Despite all these criticisms (which have some validity) I can’t dismiss literature or bring myself to say that it is irrelevant. It’s been incredibly relevant to me.