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continued...
III. ADOLESCENT REGRESSION IN AMERICAN CULTURE
During the final decades of the 20th century, marketers
and advertisers alerted media and entertainment corporations to the growing
youth market. Adolescent popularity contests in America were ideal capitalist
laboratories: a ready-made cycle in which a product’s introduction,
popularization, saturation, and obsolescence could be timed by the ringing
of schoolbells.
 What
interests us is the sharp focus of media and entertainment marketers has
had upon the adolescent demographic during the 1990s and beyond. Theirs
was a brilliant stroke of psychological insight: intrinsic quality
of artistry was virtually irrelevant. The burst of hormones and the
rush of first blood to the erogenous zones; the hideous embarrassment
of honk to the voice or menstrual blood to the white pants or the
nocturnal emission on the sheets; the first tingle; the first touch; the
first getting it, the first losing it, the first loss – each fist
of firstness with which you are belted is entirely novel to the individual
adolescent but archetypal to the adult. Rock music, the first electrified
pop music – the music of Elvis and Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys
and the Beatles that arose with the creation of the American teenager
– the voice of this all-new coming of age suppressed by patterns
of poverty, war, and Christian shame for more than a half-century –
could be read and valued for its generic quality of codifying the average,
the normal adolescent experience. That sweet 50th percentile of the Sweet
Sixteen: your first slowdance, your first kiss, your first feel, your
virginity’s loss, your first going steady, your first break-up:
signed, sealed, and delivered – imprinted – by that song that
told you exactly how you felt, and how you should feel.
Those sentiments – so completely average, yet so powerful, and so
universal – propelled the music industry into its apogee of corporatization
through boy-band and girl-idol svengalis who comprised entertainment factories.
We see this at work today in the television show “American Idol,”
when contestants prove themselves by adding no more than a soupçon
of individuality to pop’s past. This show, a distillation of the
entertainment industry’s logic, forges a false equation between
popular appeal and intrinsic quality.
The Boy Bedlam Review intends to reverse this
equation – to champion intrinsic quality, and elucidate
difficulty via the association of ideas, to allow great works of art to
rise once again into the popular consciousness.
IV. AXIOMS AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF
LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
WE AFFIRM THE FOLLOWING:
The work of art – grandly defined – is primarily,
though not exclusively, the aesthetic expression of an individual or singular
consciousness: one that conveys multiple meanings apprehended most immediately
via emotional resonance.
The editor’s task is to understand that individual
or singular consciousness; defend its multiplicity of expression against
the forces that would make it speak singly, or speak other than what it
is; and locate – and judiciously facilitate the removal of –
obstacles to its expression, while remaining in the service of its aesthetic.
The critic’s task is to appreciate that expression
of unique consciousness; be highly attuned to the ways in which form,
color, tone, timbre, tempo, diction, images, and symbols create not merely
emotions, but the relative change in the perceiver’s emotions
in time or space; and to discuss how these, and the operation of unfamiliar
ideas, create meaning for those whose education or life experience had
not supplied the relevant contexts for comprehension.
But these are only the critic’s tools in the service of an ultimate
goal.
For nearly a century, the critic’s goal was defined by Matthew
Arnold, and fortified by T.S. Eliot. Arnold asserted (after Percy
Bysshe Shelley) that as religious belief declined in the face
of science’s advance, poetry would take up the standard of truth;
and thus it is necessary to create a canon, to bring to attention the
best that has been thought and said. Eliot furthered this, conservatively,
to “shore these ruins” of civilization after World War I,
and later, to draw attention to the Metaphysicals, among others, to forge
a return to Christianity.
This critical “statement of purpose” immediately began to
die slowly. The first signs of terminal illness appeared as Virginia Woolf,
Simone de Beauvoir, and Betty Friedan brought female consciousness into
contemporary conversation and Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis brought
the female unconscious into general consideration – and psychoanalytic
literary interpretation became widespread. Derrida and poststructuralism
sought to show how the author’s “intentions” were undermined
by the Trace. It was but a step of evolution from there to feminist, queer,
racial, and ethnic studies that admirably – if at points excessively,
and alienatingly militaristically – depicted how classic works of
literature inscribed a white, male, heterosexist, European perspective
and authority and repressed the voices and concerns of women and minorities.
This had the effect, within the popular press, and the increasingly liberalized,
socioeconomically diverse, racially and religiously myriad American university,
of casting traditional canonized works as privileged and culturally unresponsive
expressions of the “Dead White European Male.”
The “New Historicism” attempted to reign in
the excesses of these theoretical cultural studies by reading works –
particularly Renaissance works – in the context of unknown, unstudied,
contemporary texts to establish the way in which literatures problematized,
rather than codified, power relations and their manipulations and effects.
And in the last ten to twenty years, a “new” new historicism
has arisen, seeking to create a fuller understanding of how texts were
received, and what they meant, within their own epoch, by studying adjacent
texts, the response of texts to one another, their intentional and unintentional
misreadings of earlier works, and locating them within their social and
political milieu. This latest method of interpretation, it must be noted,
was made possible by the efforts of innumerable scholars over the last
few decades who, finding canon texts and authors overburdened by scholarship,
and, needing to find avenues of original scholarship for doctoral theses
and tenure-able publications – in the oversubscribed, strikingly
competitive industry of humanities academia – turned to minor, uncanonized
texts, authors, and contexts.
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Why the bird cry?
by MoonChild
“El Ateno,” Buenos Aires
by • Proserpina •
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