Literary criticism
Subtitle: a concise political history
By: Joseph North
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 253
ISBN-13: 9780674967731
Subjects: Criticism; History; Political aspects; Neoliberalism
Description: Literary Criticism offers a concise overview of literary studies in the English-speaking world from the early twentieth century to the present. Joseph North steps back from the usual tangle of figures, schools, and movements in order to analyze the intellectual paradigms that underpinned them. The result is a radically new account of the discipline's development, together with a trenchant argument about where its political future lies. People in today's literature departments often assume that their work is politically progressive, especially when compared with the work of early- and mid-twentieth-century critics. North's view is less cheering. For when understood in relation to the longer arc of the discipline, the current historicist and contextualist mode in literary studies represents a step to the Right. Since the global turn to neoliberalism in the late 1970s, all the major movements within literary studies have been diagnostic rather than interventionist in character: scholars have developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing culture, but they have retreated from systematic attempts to transform it. In this respect, the political potential of current literary scholarship compares poorly with that of earlier critical modes, which, for all their faults, at least had a programmatic commitment to cultural change. Yet neoliberalism is now in crisis--a crisis that presents opportunities as well as dangers. North argues that the creation of a genuinely interventionist criticism is one of the central tasks facing those on the Left of the discipline today.--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The critical revolution turns right; title: The scholarly turn; title: The historicist/contextualist paradigm; title: The critical unconscious; title: Conclusion: The future of criticism; title: Appendix: the critical paradigm and T. S. Eliot