A survey of contemporary attitudes about the relationship of literature
and politics is a walk in a mine field. Opinions are so many and so deeply
planted that I am bound to overlook one even as I am standing on it. So I
go forward gingerly but not fearfully because my metaphor reminds me of
the distance between the risks of literature and the risks of politics even as
I bind them together. I am a white woman from the central United States.
I have never witnessed the explosion of a mine.

I begin with the most basic questions. Are literature and the study of it
political? Should they be? Assumptions run both ways. Those who assume
that the study of what is called literature is not sufficiently political are
often marxists. Take, for example, Terry Eagleton: "[Criticism] engages at
no significant point with any substantive social interest, and as a form of
discourse is almost entirely self-validating and self-perpetuating." ¹ Or
Frank Lentricchia:

We have let our beliefs and our discourse be invaded by the eviscerating notion
that politics is something that somehow goes on somewhere else, in the "out-
side" world, as the saying goes, and that the work of culture that goes on
"inside" the university is somehow apolitical -- and that this is a good thing. ²

And yet marxists are not necessarily content with the work of other marx-
ists. Again it is Terry Eagleton who, despite praise for Fredric Jameson,
argues that in The Political Unconscious Jameson still leaves the outside
world to the politicians and writes only for literary critics. ³ Edward Said
agrees with this assessment (though notes the paradox of Eagleton's
chiding Jameson even as he identifies with the same marxist school of
literary interpretation) and adds,

Unlike France, high culture in America is assumed to be above politics as a
matter of unanimous convention. And unlike England, the intellectual center
here is filled not by European imports (although they play a considerable role)
but by an unquestioned ethic of objectivity and realism, based essentially on an
epistemology of separation and difference. ⁴

I am in sympathy with such statements, and yet the more of them that I
find, the more I wonder about this inside/outside split. Who assumes high
culture is only "inside," above politics? In Criticism and Social Change,
Lentricchia accuses Paul de Man. But Lentricchia is not entirely successful
in demonstrating that Kenneth Burke's form of deconstruction, praised as
political (that is, politically correct), is distinctly different from de Man's

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