Some thoughts on my thoughts

So, I'm reading a lovely book I got for Christmas, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. It's written by Harold Bloom, perhaps the most well-read man alive and a famous critic. Or perhaps he's more infamous than famous: While his opinions are well known and often cited, they are nearly as often dismissed. At any rate, in Shakespeare criticism, he's a scholar to be reckoned with.

I'm about 100 pages into the book (which has some 745 pages), and I've begun making a list of huge claims that he makes in passing but offers no evidence for. For example, he says that Christopher Marlowe — the other great Renaissance dramatist, who was famous several years before Shakespeare — essentially invented the dramatic form that Shakespeare used and that Shakespeare only added inwardness and individuality of characters. I've got a couple other such statements on my list, and I'm pretty sure that at some point I'm either going to do some research to decide for myself whether his assertions are true, or I'm going to use them as classroom exercises/writing assignments.

So. To the point. The latest thing I read struck me as a stretch — the kind of stretch that is common in much of modern literary criticism, drawing inferences that I definitely would not arrive at on my own. But what really hit me was the idea that maybe he was right. Maybe, just maybe, this most famous of literary critics was actually a better, more "accurate" reader than I am. Now, I'd had that thought before, but what hit me even harder was a new idea: What has the greatest influence on how I understand an author? Is it what the author says or what I already believe? More specifically, Do I allow myself to believe that others' opinions match mine until explicitly proven otherwise?

And now I'm intrigued by the question. I value literature and scholarly writing because they can expand the ways I envision the world. But it has now occurred to me that I really don't let outside perspectives influence me as much as I thought? In fact, according to my new hypothesis, it's quite the opposite: I read myself into others' writing, thereby removing the possibility of real influence from them. And once I discover something authentically foreign, do I automatically dismiss it, or do I allow it to interact with my established beliefs until I incorporate it, exclude it, or provisionally accept it?

So what really interests me is the fact that over all the years of reading that I've done, I may have been thoughtlessly reinforcing my own perspectives by interpolating them into what I've been reading. Now, I don't have a problem with genuine inquiry into an author's ideas and then using their new ideas to strengthen what I already believed, whether their overall ideas agree with mine or not. But I'm worried that instead of that kind of inquiry, I've merely been toodling along, believing that each author's critical assumptions matched my own until proven otherwise. I don't know if it's really true, but I suppose I'll have to think more carefully about it as I read in the future.