of both linguistic and social codes that seemed to dominate artistic produc-
tion, and in opposition both to the veneer of refinement and to refinement as
a value that seemed to dominate so-called high art, an interest in the origin-
ality of individual vision and work gave way in some circles to an interest in
the authentically common experience, it was assumed, of the dispossessed:
workers, women, gays, the racially outcast, and others. John Barrell, for
example, complained that balanced art, supposedly fully blending spontan-
eity and craft, both proceeded from and addressed“a [bogus] middle point
between and above all merely partial and particular situations”and in doing
so bore“a close resemblance to a certain ideal construction of the situation of
the middle class–neither aristocratic nor vulgar, neither reactionary nor
progressive.”^48 In reaction he undertook against the grain to read in the voice
and interest of the dispossessed, to show that“much of the poetry in the
canon of English literature can also be read as writing produced by and about
a particular class and gender, and that it will produce‘universal meaning’
only for those who define the universal in the image of that class and
gender.”^49 Why should we be centrally interested in so-called originality in
work that in fact reveals itself as both stale and bound by class and gender?
Why not instead follow Lillian S. Robinson and take an interest in the two-
page autobiography of an“anonymous Seamer on Men’s Underwear”who
participated in one of the“Summer Schools for Women Workers held at
Bryn Mawr in the first decades of the [twentieth] century”? True, the piece is,
as Robinson notes,“a circumstantial narrative in which events from the
melancholy to the melodramatic are accumulated in a somewhat hackneyed
style,”but it is at least“honest writing”and, Robinson argues,“clichés or
sentimentality need not be signals of meretricious prose.”^50
Or one might, in a deconstructive spirit, follow Jacques Derrida’s efforts to
unmask the imperialist but always failed efforts of philosophers, critics, and
theorists to“neutralize or reduce”the play of language and of social codes by
giving them“a center or...referring [them] to a point of presence, a fixed(^48) John Barrell,“Introduction,”in J. Barrell,Poetry, Language and Politics(Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 1988), pp. 5–6.
(^49) Barrell,“Preface,”inibid., p. ix.
(^50) Lillian S. Robinson,“Treason our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,”Tulsa
Studies in Women’s Literature(1983), reprinted inCritical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 572– 82
at p. 581A.
128 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art