The function of criticism : from the Spectator to post-structuralism

Abstract

This is a brief history and critique of the critical institution itself, from Addison and Steele to Barthes and Derrida. The book raises crucial questions about the relations between language, literature and politics. How is it possible that modern criticism, which was born of the struggle against the absolutist state, could be reduced to its current status as part of the relations branch of the literary industry? How is it that forms of criticism generated in the vibrant context of the 18th-century public sphere - of clubs, journals, coffee houses, periodicals - and which embraced free and open discussion of cultural, political and economic questions could degenerate into post-structuralist exercises carried out by academic literary specialists who revel in their own practical impotence? Exercised by these issues, Terry Eagleton - Britain's foremost Marxist critic - traces the birth of criticism in Englightenment England, and its subsequent mutations over time under the pressures of the development of capitalism, the rise of a counter-public from below, and the specialization of the intellectual division of labour. In this survey of the last 200 years of cultural criticism, spanning from Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Samuel Johnson to Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen and F.R. Leavis, the book places the modern trends of New Criticism, structuralism and deconstruction in a social and historical perspective. However, Eagleton also makes a case for contemporary criticism to rediscover its original function by reconnecting the cultural and the political, discourse and practice, and thereby to play a role in radical social transformations. Terry Eagleton is the author of Ideology Against the Grain, Walter Benjamin and Criticism and Ideology.

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