Reviews of Raine's Monograph on T. S. Eliot

I must admit I've not read Raine's work yet, and I probably won't get around to it for a while, but I found the following reviews fascinating in their foci.

“Raine’s Sterile Thunder” by Terry Eagleton for Prospect Magazine.
Eagleton's review, which dismisses Raine as an "acolyte" bearing offerings to the "high priest," seems rather peculiar. Eagleton takes Raine to task for neglecting to address TSE’s misogyny, anti-Semitism, purported homosexuality, etc., but then he reminds us that the poetry itself is what matters.

and a review by Tom Paulin for The Guardian.
Paulin also wonders why Raine doesn't investigate Eliot's private life or socio-political views.

Both reviews evoke, to me, the flamethrowing years of the 1980s and 1990s when any critic worth his or her salt (Gilbert & Gubar, Pinkney, Ellman, etc.) took a potshot at Eliot. Studies of Eliot's misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, sexuality, psychology, etc. triumphed over rather moderate, less-politicized explorations of his work. The tide has, of course, shifted, and scholars are publishing critiques that study Eliot's poetry, drama, and social criticism that illustrate the man's complexity rather than casting him as a strictly reactionary figure.

The impetus for this shift, I believe, lies in the extreme positions that several critics maintained in the latter half of hte 1990s. For example, Suman Gupta wrote an essay for The Times Higher Education Supplement in 1996. Gupta he argued against a “liberal consensus” that admitted Eliot’s numerous personal faults “[did] not make him a bad poet.” Gupta disagrees, for the as the aesthetic remains tightly bound with the social, and “all evaluative acts are social,” then a writer's personal politics should affect his or her literary status. Consequently, Gupta maintains, the canon requires a re-evaluation of “great” writers.

Gupta’s argument focuses on modernists (including Joyce, an author typically excluded from charges of racism and anti-Semitism), and he asserts that their works “should not be given to any students as 'great’ any longer--they provide neither social-cultural nor aesthetic-literary models.” On other words, get rid of 'em.

I found it curious then--and now--that Gupta's critcism focsed on racism alone. Why not misogyny? homophobia? Like I said, curious.

Furthermore, how far back should we take such revisions? Should we eliminate Shakespeare, Chaucer, Swift, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston? If you apply it to one author, you should apply it to all. If we're going to trace out negative stereotypes, we might as well dismiss the canon altogether. Yes, it's a slippery-slope argument, but I do think that Gupta's suggestion crests such a slope and begins a downward slide.

This is not to say that readers should ignore such issues; instead, we might consider how questionable portrayals of human beings--be it a "simple" stereotype (Lydia Languish) or blatantly racist (Bleistein)--informs a work. What socio-cultural or historical context permitted or encouraged such views? And how can we use these works to shatter still-extant myths about human beings? This seems to be the current of contemporary scholarship, and long may its course run.