Revising Revision: Methodologies of Love, Desire, and Resistance in Beloved and If Beale Street Could Talk

Abstract

Revisionary approaches have become increasingly apparent in contemporary literary criticism, so much so that New Literary History dedicated an issue to the topic in 1998. Among the articles featured therein is Miguel Tarnen’s “Phenomenology of the Ghost: Revision in Literary History,” which traces the popularity of the terra “revisionism” to Harold Bloom, who described it as a combative need for the poet or reader “to usurp” from the text or tradition “a place, a stance, a fullness, an illusion of identification or possession” (Bloom 17). However, both Tamen and Bloom recognize that although revisionism produces the illusion of truth as well as the prospect for novelty, it inherently denies either possibility (Tamen 302). While the text seeks to demystify the pre-text, revisionism, by definition, turns in on itself “All of us,” writes Bloom, “despite our overt desires, arc doomed to become the subjects of our own need for demystification” (16). Another of the issue’s articles is a report from a focus group led by Norman Holland on the topic of revisionism, consisting of experts from the fields of psychology, literary studies, writing, and science. The report attributes to revisionism a threefold functionality: it is a means of rejecting past literary theories (of which New Criticism arose as a primary candidate), of responding to and rebelling against “political marginalization,” and of “asserting the role and situation of the subject” (178–179).