5. “Our reading of a work should be ‘disinterested’….In other words, our reading should be neutral, impartial, not distorted by prior ideological assumptions” or preconceived ideas. This idea is traced to English empiricism and the notion that “We should experience the text directly rather than applying ideas to it.”
Again, we have here in New Critical ideals the presumably detached, neutral observer of the ideals of modern science. There remains something to recommend in this position, insofar as it also grows out of a firm commitment to trying to listen to the text
as much as possible on its own terms instead of only appropriating it to one's own interests. The difference now is our sense of how much this is possible, our awareness of the limitations and challenges faced when trying to engage with the otherness of the text (please excuse the trendy invocation of the word 'other' but I couldn't think of a better word -- suggestions welcome!). All reading is now commonly regarded as interested, filtered, and--at its most pessimistic--partial and distorting.
The pendulum has swung from the objectivist ideal of the New Critic to the subjectivist distopia, from the denial of the self to the rejection of the another self. Note also that a corollary of the objective observer is the possibility of neutral, objective evaluation potentially capable of dispassionate, universal acceptance; likewise, the dominance of hyper-subjectivity renders evaluation of worth an impossibility, even should such worth be granted to exist.
Other, more measured ways of voicing an ideal similar to the New Critic's disinterestedness but without modernist baggage would include the concept of reading with 'good faith' or reading charitably, a notion whose various forms dot Christian history all the way back to Augustine at least (as with so many other things, good ol' Augustine). Both the idea of 'good faith' and 'reading charitably' attend to reading as an interpersonal encounter which can indeed produce knowledge--both interpersonal knowledge and otherwise--even though the mystery of that encounter precludes anything like Cartesian certainty. For myself, I can neither read as an everyman nor an island; neither depersonalized nor radically isolated; the former is at best a god-like illusion, the latter a vice masqueraded as necessity.
Current thinking on 'preconceived ideas' stresses without them, one cannot read at all. Not my bag to prove that here (haha!), but just a brief comment: the problem with preconceived ideas seems to me to be not that we have them, but that we bring to bear on the text ones that don't belong. And, despite appearances to the contrary, doing so outside certain set limitations and fashions is still called
bad, far-fetched, or just plain silly in degree programs. What I aim for, at least, is to fill out my intertextual knowledge of the text's historical moment so that I have more and more at my fingertips the preconceptions and even some of the sensibilities that are
more likely to belong that those natural to my own cultural and personal moment. I am under no delusion that I can be a 15th century reader, but neither do I despair of sharing some of that reader's means of approaching the text. In fact, such a practice as I have outlined is not merely an exercise of historical imagination or literary appreciation; it is also potentially an act of charity. I think I have Augustine and many others in the Church with me in preferring to try and love. So with this assumption of New Criticism, I would partly accept the goal of taking the text somehow as much as possible on its own terms, but change the language of objective detachment to a language of charitable interpersonal encounter.
