After the Death of LiteratureSIU Press, 1997 - 181 pàgines Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic since Aristotle, Richard B. Schwartz assumes the perspective of that quintessential eighteenth-century man of letters to examine the critical and theoretical literary developments that gained momentum in the 1970s and stimulated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Schwartz speculates that Johnson--who revered hard facts, a wide cultural base, and common sense--would have exhibited scant patience with the heavily academic approaches currently favored in the study of literature. He considers it probable that the combatants in the early struggles of the culture wars are losing energy and that, in the wake of Alvin Kernan's declaration of the death of literature, new battlegrounds are developing. Ironically admiring the orchestration and staging of battles old and new--"superb" he calls them--he characterizes the entire cultural war as a "battle between straw men, carefully constructed by the combatants to sustain a pattern of polarization that could be exploited to provide continuing professional advancement." In seven diverse essays, Schwartz calls for both the broad cultural vision and the sanity of a Samuel Johnson from those who make pronouncements about literature. Running through and unifying these essays is the conviction that the cultural elite is clearly detached from life: "Academics, fleeing in horror from anything smacking of the bourgeois, offer us something far worse: bland sameness presented in elitist terms in the name of the poor." Another theme is that the either/or absolutism of many of the combatants is "absurd on its face [and] belies the complexities of art, culture, and humanity." Like Johnson, Schwartz would terminate the divorce between literature and life, make allies of literature and criticism, and remove poetry from the province of the university and return it to the domain of readers. Texts would carry meaning, embody values, and have a serious impact on life. |
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... American literature is largely the work of northeastern white Protestant males . Stereotypical presentations of literary realities are neither accurate nor helpful . Rather than bland generalities fiercely uttered by those who would ...
... America 00 99 98 97 432 I Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data . Schwartz , Richard B. After the ... American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials , ANSI Z39 ...
... American literature who was interested in challenging the traditional construc- tion of the literary canon . His posture was a familiar one : Literary canons are made by those with access to the institu- tions that produce and reproduce ...
Richard B. Schwartz. Introduction writers my American literature teacher foisted upon me and my class- mates thirty years ago . Perhaps we must restrict this to nineteenth - century America ; then we will find that good old northeastern ...
... American West . The West had attracted D. H. Lawrence ( as well as Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams ) , we were told , and we were promptly handed R. W. B. Lewis's American Adam and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land . Faulkner was taught ...
Continguts
Are Addison and Steele Dead? | 60 |
Vaticide for Fun and Profit | 78 |
The War Between the Straw | 113 |