Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society; M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism

Abstract

Imre Salusinszky’s Criticism in Society is the post-modern moment in the history of the “function of criticism at the present time” polemic: politically correct, theoretically extreme, relentlessly dialogic, and self-congratulatory in its self-reference. A series of interviews conducted by Salusinszky with nine members of the literary-theoretical establishment (Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller), Criticism in Society undertakes both to answer the ever-vexed question of criticism’s social role and to enact a response. This is to be achieved by two means. First, as the interviews progress, each critic is shown the dialogues which have taken place before his or her own, resulting in a kind of interweaving of voices, commentaries on commentaries. Further, the interviewees are asked to comment on Wallace Stevens’ “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”, in order to demonstrate “some of the practical consequences of different theoretical positions” (p. 5). The former strategy reveals a great deal about the interviewees; the latter about the concerns of the interviewer, with whom the success or failure of this book lies.