I'm going to have to admit up front that Jeffrey Williams' essay, "Packaging Theory," did not (for me) appear to add too many new concepts to the on-going Literary Criticism dialogue; that being said, he often phrases things in an interesting way. For instance, I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment that "the history of criticism is not a neutral or innocent category, but has a polemical significance and legitimates a certain line of criticism and a particular direction of doing literary work" (282). History of any kind is seldom if ever neutral, being controlled by those who control the cultural voice at any given time.
He also states that "the work of criticism is no longer as much 'close reading' but theoretical speculation, on language, interpretation itself, society, gender, culture, and so on" (282). Again, I agree, but this makes me sad. I am, by no means, a formalist at heart, but I do believe we have lost the ability (or maybe the heart?) to look at literature as art. We are too busy trying to find the subversive meanings of real or imagined symbology. The idea of "compartmentalizing" our literature so completely into gender-readings or Marxist-treatise has clouded our ability to simply appreciate language and structure.
His use of the terms "hall-of-fame" and "food-group" to describe specific types of anthologies is humorous as an attempt to explain the way we often try to give a specific order to critical dialogue, with the "hall-of-fame" privileging certain theorists over others and the "food-group:" "[casting] theoretical work in terms of its alignments rather than as individual pockets in intellectual history" (289).
He has an interesting way of describing the way we categorize and use critical theory, and, though I've heard much of this before, I did love his phrasing as he spoke about the "storied history of theory" (295).
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I completely agree about Williams adding very little to my understanding of composition theory. It seemed as though he was far more interested in writing a proposal for an anthology he had not been given the opportunity to publish. What I found much more interesting about your entry was your refreshing stance on close reading. I agree with you that we, as teachers and as students, are constantly expected to view a piece of writing through an established lens. I think there are benefits and at times for these criticisms, but the new social expectation to immediately search in a “subversive” fashion, as you deem it in your piece, is limiting. Perhaps we as teachers and scholars should reexamine our motives toward what we ultimately want to gain in what we read and write about.
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