Publisher's Synopsis
This book looks at what criticism is, how criticism comes about, how it changes and how it interacts with and reflects cultures. The book is about modern literary criticism in relation to the idea of criticism as a social and cultural practice in the 20th-century. The discussion in "Criticism and Culture" concerns both what criticism is and how it operates in culture and through social relations.;The immediate aim of this book is three fold. (1) It develops a history (or genealogy) of the concept of philosophical critique from the enlightenment through to the present. (2) It examines this concept in relation to literary studies to show a more or less self-conscious pursuit of a critical definition of culture. In this examination of criticism and critique the authors focus on particular critiques of cultural assumptions and institutions that are pursued in literary studies - large modes of assumption and inquiry. (3) In doing so, the authors present a revised understanding of literary criticism as consisting of modes of cultural critique and suggest a selective history of 20th-century literary studies within the broad areas of psychological criticism, structuralism and semiotics, philosophical criticism (particularly deconstruction and post-structuralism), historical criticism (Marxist and Foucauldian) and feminism and other more or less self-conscious forms of cultural criticism.;In pursuing this aim, the book aims to make clear the link between literary criticism and critique and the fact that critique cannot proceed without an engagement with cultural analysis.;The book is divided between two chapters that introduce the nature of the inquiry and five subsequent chapters that explore criticism and critique across the 20th-century. The first two chapters create thoretical and historical contexts for thinking about criticism and critique, setting the stage with attempts to understand the nature of the critical interprose as both an epistemological and a social activity. The last five chapters explore major portions of the critical terrain from the mid-19th-century through to comprehensive 20th-century projects to redefine the critical activity and engage in effective cultural critique.
