The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms is a reference source that locates critical/literary terms both by definition, in history, and with examples. Any words in the definitions that are defined elsewhere in the text are bolded, so that within each definition there are typically several bolded words that can be located elsewhere in the text. This method leads to circularity as one jumps to a bolded word within a definition and in turn has to look up a third definition, all to trace one’s way back to the first definition. As the pages riffle for a while, one wonders if alphabetical order is all it’s hyped up to be, and if things could perhaps be organized into more discrete categories—maybe by time period, writing style, etc.? But many of these would be problematic also.
Perhaps there is no one good way to organize literary terms.
Looking through the glossary also made me think more deeply about subjectivity. At first glance and in reading for class I assumed it was objective; after all, it’s a reference source, practically a dictionary. But as I was looking through different poetic and prose terms, I noted the examples given for each term and wondered where they came from. Were they from “dominant” or “minority” culture? Were multiple social and ethnic groups being represented? Certainly, the Bedford‘s definition of new criticism did not quite help me grasp the connotation and motive behind the movement. My glossary, then, is flawed. Just like I assume many reference sources are, though I would have never realized that had I not thought about it.
The Bedford is particularly intriguing to me as it identifies historical literary events and works, and is therefore a place at which history and literature intersect. Just like literary terms and new criticism, I always thought that history consisted of netural facts as well. In Interdisciplinarity, Moran discusses the subjectivity of history. A philosopher named Croce “argued that history was a necessarily inexact and subjective area of knowledge” and that it “‘has the character of “contemporary history” because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate’” (108).
I think that it’s important to remember that the power structures around us are not as neutral and objective as we may at times think. Not even the world of academia is objective and factual—history, glossaries, dictionaries, ways of thinking and speaking—are all subjective. We tend to consider the past in terms of the present rather than in light of its context, which can be problematic. Perhaps this is why, as just one example of many, some criticize people of color for protesting what is going on in the country today, saying that civil rights activists from the 60’s wouldn’t participate in such demonstrations. They who think this way are able to justify this thinking by quantifying history subjectively in terms of the present, rather than seeing it in its appropriate context and recognizing today’s protest for what it is: reasonable and peaceful.