Why Scholarly Disagreement is Good
Deep engagement leads to divergent views which enriches our collective understanding
What is a writer’s relationship to their own work? It might seem like a weird question but it’s one that literary theorists think about and come up with different answers — extremely different answers, actually. On one side we have scholars asserting that the writer has virtually no influence over the text and, on the other, that individual genius is all that matters. So, we have Roland Barthes with ‘the death of the author’[1] and New Historicism suggesting that the text is literally constructed by historical forces[2] and, at the opposite extreme, we have Harold Bloom who is openly scornful of these ideas[3]. Bloom favors a more adversarial paradigm in which writers compete with each other for literary recognition and what really matters is a writer’s ability to endow their text with aesthetic power. Texts, for Bloom, are expressions of individual genius.
So, based on the difference between their positions, you might think that they arrive at those positions via very different paths, but that isn’t the case. Underlying their divergent views is a surprising consensus. They work the same field in a very real sense. For example, here are Bloom and Barthes on questions of originality and influence: