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. |
Des de l'interior del llibre
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... genre fiction . " The norm was more a Johnsonian one . Who has pleased many and pleased long ? Whose work transcends its time and place ? Answer : Thoreau , who was much more than a New England writer ; Thoreau influenced Gandhi . And ...
... genre or subject rather than by race , religion , gender , or mailing address . We were much taken , for example , with Nathanael West , who was categorized as a " California novelist . " And who is to say that that is not fair ? Who ...
... genre fiction . I hope that their use in combination is not distracting ; I believe that it would trouble Johnson less than it would later critics , and I believe that eclecticism and the convergence of high and popular culture , which ...
... genre fiction , popular culture , educational statis- tics , and personal reminiscences . It is not a common combination . Whether or not it is a useful one I leave to the judgment of the reader . Whether my own use of these ma- terials ...
... genre - driven , plot - driven ethos in popular culture that is either scorned by the academy or ( often ) studied in such a way as to nurse the hurts of coteries of the like - minded . There are also , of course , a number of discrete ...
Continguts
Are Addison and Steele Dead? | 60 |
Vaticide for Fun and Profit | 78 |
The War Between the Straw | 113 |