Charlie Ericson in Aeon:
If all the writing that claimed to ‘subvert’ our expectations actually did so, society would have long since learned to live without expectations. The word has become a staple of book reviews and jacket blurbs, a foundation for how undergraduates understand the value of a text, and an aspiration for writers hoping to establish a reputation for colouring outside the lines. This commercial and institutional ubiquity is made stranger by the fact that, except in rare discussions of theological corruption, this very old word has become associated with literature only in the past 70 years. In 1956, the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner became the first to deploy it as a literary-critical term in an essay in The Sewanee Review: he claimed that the Irish poet W B Yeats had ‘subverted’ a tradition. Kenner was using the word in the sense it had since its entry into English via the Wycliffe Bible: to raze, to destroy, to overthrow, or to corrupt.
The fourth in that list is crucial: ‘to corrupt’ hints at the distinction between subversion and revolution. We might call a revolution an inversion of the social order that happens only once Hierarchy No 1 has been weakened enough that Hierarchy No 2 can come into power. It would be impossible for a revolution to be both successful and secret. Subversion, on the other hand, affiliates success with secrecy. Subversion is effective precisely because it takes a keen perception to point it out: it implies corruption so subtle that it eludes notice, even when you think you’re looking.
The idea that Yeats subverted a tradition, though, still implies that traditions are susceptible to wholesale destruction, one that may begin obliquely but end in the rise of a completely new tradition. But literary traditions are not so brittle as that.
More here.
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