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John Donne |
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The emergence of Donne as a major poet in the eyes of the twentieth century corresponded in time to, and in some ways was intertwined with, the rise of the New Critical approach to the study of literature and especially of poetry. In fact, Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn, one of the most influential volumes of New Critical poetry analysis, takes its title from Donne's "The Canonization." In line with the theories of New Criticism, much of the attention to Donne's poetry has been heavily FORMALIST in emphasis, addressing the texts as ends in themselves whose own rhetorical and structural properties offer all the materials needed for analysis and comprehension.
Even so closed a textual approach as that posited by the New Critics has traditionally made room for PSYCHOLOGICAL, MYTHOLOGICAL, and GENDER applications, although the last category has largely involved a recirculation of familiar and unreexamined male attitudes toward women. Other, more recent commentators, not trained in the rigors of New Criticism, have enlarged the context of Donne studies to incorporate a BIOGRAPHICAL approach to his work.
Thomas Docherty, in the Introduction to his John Donne Undone (1986), decries this cluster of traditional approaches, and states: "In challenging this with a more theoretical and critical reading, and drawing extensively on post-structuralist theory, this book proposes three main culturally significant and historically problematical areas which bear on Donne's writings: the scientific discourse, which troubles secular historicity itself; the sociocultural, in which woman raises certain defences in this male poet; and the aesthetic, in which mimetic writing itself becomes fraught with difficulty." In his employment of HISTORICAL, GENDER, and DECONSTRUCTIONIST approaches, Docherty provides a fresh and stimulating rereading of Donne, one that deliberately, as its title suggests, "undoes" the traditional sense of Donne and opens up new avenues of access to his work.
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