PARSING THE PERSONAL

There is something utopian about Joseph North's project to reopen a space within literary studies for criticism. His bold reconstruction, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), launched a sustained polemic against what he saw as the reigning historicist-contextualist paradigm o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New Left review 2021-11 (132)
Main Author: McManus, Patricia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic disciplines
Ambition
Criticism
Fractured
Literary criticism
Parsing
Political history
Radicalism
Social research
Subjectivity
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Summary:There is something utopian about Joseph North's project to reopen a space within literary studies for criticism. His bold reconstruction, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), launched a sustained polemic against what he saw as the reigning historicist-contextualist paradigm of the discipline--represented by Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti--in which the assumed goal of literary study was cultural and social analysis. Against this, North called for a renewed programme of left literary criticism that would also be a radical aesthetic education, one which aimed to cultivate modes of sensibility and subjectivity that could contribute directly to the struggle for a better society. To seek to exchange a scholarship that merely interprets the world for a criticism that tries to change it is admirable, even exhilarating. In a field that is generally fractured and fractious, reading a contribution that is both pragmatic and radicalizing in its ambition is bracing.
ISSN:0028-6060
2044-0480