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After Fifty Years: Notes On Reconsidering A Thesis On Macbeth, Clifford Davidson
After Fifty Years: Notes On Reconsidering A Thesis On Macbeth, Clifford Davidson
Clifford Davidson
How many scholars look back at their doctoral dissertations after a half-century and consider how much critical discussion has changed and how accepted methodologies have been overthrown. To be sure, as a graduate student I already was uncomfortable as early as the 1950s with the so-called “New Criticism,” which valued complexity and “organic unity” in a poem, novel, or dramatic work. Yet it was in those days quite impossible to imagine that the demise of current fashions of thought was in fact imminent, a shattering of the framework into which so much effort had been expended for so many years.