Goal Of Criticism Research Articles

Литературная критика Корнея Чуковского и остроумие по Фрейду

The originality of literary criticism by Korney Chukovsky is examined in the article through the prism of the contradictory principles of his critical method: on the one hand, he saw the goal of criticism as revealing the hidden (unconscious) soul of the artist through the analysis of his style, on the other hand, he was initially aimed at self-expression in creativity and achieving success with caustic wit. It is shown that from the point of view of promotion his literary reputation, Chukovsky’s focus on wit was more productive than his “psychologism,” which is due to the feuilleton genre of his literary criticism and the desire to win recognition among the mass reader of periodicals. In this regard, it is proposed to draw typological parallels between Chukovsky’s critical techniques and the techniques of wit described in S. Freud’s work “Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious” (1905). As a result, it is concluded that Chukovsky’s literary criticism contains many of the mechanisms of wit described by Freud, namely: verbal and tendentious witticisms (of an unconsciously aggressive nature), ridiculing literary authorities and morals, as well as the tastes of the mass reader; techniques of condensation, semantic shift, nonsense, witticism-exaggeration, witticism with unification or with a hint, depiction through the opposite (close to irony); image through a trifle, on what a caricature, cartoon, parody, travesty, etc. are based.

The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture ed. by Kathryn E. Holliday

Reviewed by: The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture ed. by Kathryn E. Holliday Joel Barna The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture. Edited by Kathryn E. Holliday. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 448. Illustrations, notes, index.) David Dillon, with a Ph.D. in literature from Harvard, came to Dallas to teach at Southern Methodist University in 1969. In 1980, he wrote an essay for D Magazine, provocatively titled “Why is Dallas architecture so bad?” In 1981, he became the full-time architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, a position he held until 2006. During that twenty-five-year stretch, he wrote more than one thousand articles for the newspaper, while also contributing to national and regional architecture magazines and other publications. In the mid-1990s, he moved back to Massachusetts, where he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and continued his prolific writing output. He died in 2010. The quality and the volume of his writings, which have touched on and helped shape many significant changes in Dallas and the North Texas region, made Dillon respected in his field and beloved in the city that was his sometime-home. In 2011, donors came together to fund creation of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture in the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs. University buildings and programs are almost never named for anyone but a big donor any more. In that context, the existence of the Dillon Center is testimony to the impact of his career. The Open-Ended City was edited by Kathryn E. Holliday, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and the founding director of the Dillon Center. In her introduction, Holliday says that she chose the sixty-odd pieces that make up the book with the goal of showing Dillon’s role as an interpreter of architecture outside the confines of the profession, and as a key figure in creating a new tradition of architectural criticism in Texas. Holliday’s argument is bolstered by an afterword, “The Tradition of Architecture Criticism in Texas,” by architectural historian Stephen Fox of Houston, who writes: “Dillon demystified architectural criticism in Dallas. He demonstrated that the goal of criticism was not stylistic commentary but a clarification of the processes through which decisions are made about how the public landscape is shaped” (406–407). Though mostly centered on contemporary projects in Dallas and Fort Worth, Dillon’s essays tackled issues that affect virtually all American cities. The early1980s was a wild time in land development in Dallas and throughout Texas. New buildings were going up fast, driven by one of the state’s periodic oil booms and, most of all, by a bubble in financing from newly deregulated banks and savings and loan institutions. Much of the building was nondescript, and as the boom continued, block after block [End Page 491] of old buildings were razed, leaving scattered new towers amidst acres of surface parking lots. Some downtown streets held no more urban vitality than freeway ramps. Throughout Texas, cities became, in Dillon’s words, the hole in the doughnut. The architectural press played a role as gatekeepers—independent assessors of taste who could translate the cloistered traditions and aesthetics of architecture for the public and also stoke the market. But over time, architectural criticism decreased until it had largely retreated to specialized academic and professional journals. However, things have changed in Texas downtowns, largely for the better. People have moved into them by the thousands; entertainment districts bring people from the suburbs to what in the 1980s had been a frightening wasteland. As the essays in The Open-Ended City show, David Dillon played an important role in making that transition happen. From the first essay to the last, he condemned simplistic “big-picture thinking” (the reason he thought Dallas architecture was so bad in 1980) and argued for design that would bring actual human connection back to city streets. Holliday writes that Dillon “maintained a persistent belief in the ability of an engaged citizenry to demand higher quality and greater accountability for urban context,” and that he championed...

Fundamentals of New Testament Textual Criticism ed. by Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts

Reviewed by: Fundamentals of New Testament Textual Criticism ed. by Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts Scott Charlesworth stanley e. porter and andrew w. pitts, Fundamentals of New Testament Textual Criticism ( Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). Pp. xvi + 202. Paper $22. Porter and Pitts have set out to fill a gap in the literature by writing a mid-level textbook for first- and second-year students of Greek. Their aim is to avoid both oversimplification and too much complexity by introducing NT textual criticism in enough detail to provide "exposure to major issues" (p. xiii). High expectations are dashed, however, when in chap. 1 they define the primary goal of textual criticism as "reconstruction of the original text of the NT" (p. 6). Omitted is any reference to theoretical discussions about the meaning of "original" and current preference for distinctions implied by use of the terms "authorial," "initial," and "archetype" (text). Is the rationale pragmatic, due to the limitations the authors have set themselves? If so, it cannot be justified. Moreover, the selected bibliography that follows this (and every other) chapter, which is designed to facilitate further study and make up for the paucity of footnotes, does not include any literature on the subject. In order to lay a foundation for exegesis, text-critical matters are "book-ended" by chaps. 2 and 13 on canon (the "domain of NT textual criticism") and English translations respectively. It is certainly right, as the authors explain, to get students thinking about all three areas before they come to exegesis, but the uncritical tone now becomes apologetic. The canon was established "as soon as the literature was written … and closed as soon as the last of the apostles died" (p. 30). The church did not then decide but discovered what was canonical (p. 30). The Canon 1 and 2 distinction is dismissed, and evidence to the contrary all but ignored, except as regards, for obvious reasons, the date of the Muratorian Fragment. Concerns about approach continue in chaps. 3 and 4 on materials, methods of classification, and major witnesses. There is apparent acceptance of Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett's consistently early dating of NT papyri (The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001] 58-59; cf. the endorsements [End Page 735] on pp. 46, 102), even though Comfort and Barrett's methodology has been roundly criticized by Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse ("Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Date," ETL 88 [2012] 443-74), who describe it as "theological palaeography." Additional questions about accuracy also start to arise. The review copy came with an errata slip correcting the highly inaccurate numbers of papyri, majuscules, minuscules, and lectionaries given in the book (p. 50). The notion of text-types, let alone geographically based text-types (so chap. 5), is under increasing challenge. While scribes in copying the text did not have license to change its essential meaning, the low-level "improvements" that were allowable all but disallow the classification of the papyri according to text-types. Again, there is no reference to current scholarly discussion of text-types in the text or bibliography. Chapter 6, however, contains a helpful introduction to textual variants with some input from linguistics. But students are also denied even-handed treatment in the methodological chaps. 7‒10. The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method is dismissed in a footnote (p. 90 n. 2) and the authors are ambivalent about whether students should even use the latest critical edition of the Greek New Testament (NA28, UBSGNT5) since it contains the text of the Catholic letters from the Editio Critica Maior (p. 147 n. 1). The ECM, as a result, is not among the critical editions discussed in chaps. 11‒12. In addition, the authors' strong preference for external evidence along with their hope that Sinaiticus, as "an ancient eclectic text that likely reflects or closely resembles the original" (p. 101), might become the diplomatic or base text of a future critical edition, risks "canonizing" a new "standard text" and diminishing the role of textual criticism. Finally, devaluation of the papyri (p. 102) in favor of the majuscules passes over the very important...

La Foi Postcritique, on Second Thought

How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again. (Emerson 476)Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact … readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we, the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognized, become fully cognizant of, our knowledge. (Byatt 512)Literary criticism thrives on the distinction between first and second reading, on what is often parsed as absorptive reading versus critical reading, belletristic versus analytic reading. It sets itself against the idea that a irst reading of a text might be the one in which we have “seen [it] well”-on the assumption that critical insight is belated (Emerson 476). “As scholars, we read lengthy texts [such as novels] sequentially; then, in order to write, we inevitably reread recursively,” which has the efect, as the critic Michaela Bronstein goes on to observe, of producing conlicted conceptions of the novel as either “a static object (a form) or an experience in time” (77). One goal of literary criticism would appear to be to keep readers from lingering in that temporal and immersive irst reading in order to arrive at an assessment of the total work. First reading and critique are viewed as largely anathema; second thoughts inspire us to relinquish irst impressions, in a process of questioning and revision infused with a spirit of skepticism and doubt. here is an air of supersession- something vanguardist-about critique, but as Bronstein also points out, “the purpose of rereading need not be to revise the irst reading from an analytic distance. . . . Close reading [can use] the recursive process of analysis to approach, rather than to erase, sequential reading” (78). I take Bronstein's projection of a literary criticism that accounts for rather than dismisses the absorptive aspects of irst reading as an accurate description of Rita Felski's project in The Limits of Critique, a manifesto that calls on literature scholars to recommit to “care or concern for [aesthetic] phenomena” (107). Felski makes the case for a pragmatist phenomenology and calls her method for its achievement “postcritique,” a mode of reading that declines to unmask, demystify, interrogate, subvert, or expose the literary text (the habit of generations of recent critics). Postcritique means to expand the uses of literature beyond that of marking an absence or an insufficiency, returning readers to the values that drew them to the literary work of art in the first place (“aesthetic pleasure, increased selfunderstanding, moral relection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self- loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation” [188]).

Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism by Nie Zhenzhao

Nie Zhenzhao. Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism. Beijing: Peking UP, 2014. When Nie Zhenzhao proposed ethical literary criticism about decade ago, Chinese critics were just troubled by lack of their own theoretical discourse. Against this background, Nie's efforts were rather significant. The years' work yields comprehensive theoretical framework and set of core concepts and arguments, which are exemplified in Nie's new work, Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism. The book, composed of two parts and appendixes, namely, basic theories of ethical literary criticism, application of these theories to text analysis, and list of its terms and their definitions, seeks to illuminate working mechanisms of ethical literary criticism and its terminology such as ethical taboo, ethical environment, ethical knot, ethical line, ethical identity, ethical confusion, Sphinx factor, human factor, animal factor, rational will, irrational will, natural will, and free will. The first part of book begins with discussion of origin of literature an ethical perspective. Regarding origin of literature, there are number of critical theories dealing with it, such as mimetic theory, cathartic theory, and Labor Theory. So far, most influential one has been Labor Theory conceptualized by Frederick Engels, who argues that literature, or arts in broad sense, has originated human labor. Unlike Engels, Nie forcefully argues that labor is just one of conditions for human to produce arts. Therefore, in his opinion, literature is not product of labor, but a product of morality, or a unique expression of morality in given historical and it is fundamentally an art of ethics. Nie then defines ethical literary criticism as a critical theory that approaches literary works on basis of their ethical essence and educational function perspective of ethics (13). In this part, Nie also draws distinction between ethical literary criticism and moral criticism. In Nie's conceptual system, moral criticism lays much emphasis on good or bad evaluation of given literary work today's moral principles (128), while goal of ethical literary criticism is to uncover ethical factors that bring literature into existence and ethical elements that affect characters and events in literary works, thus examining ethical values of given work with reference to particular historical context or period of time in which text under discussion is written. To illuminate this issue, Nie uses Shakespeare's Hamlet as an example. According to moral criticism, influential interpretations are play about character and that about Oedipus complex (130). However, perspective of ethical literary criticism, readers might find that it is a tragedy about ethical dilemma aroused by change of Hamlet's ethical identity (133). A big breakthrough in first part is discussion about biological and ethical section. Nie points out the biggest problem for mankind to solve is to make choice between identities of animals and identities of human beings (32). The theory of biological by Darwin and argument of labor assumption by Engels are regarded to be forceful in differentiating human animals, yet, in Nie's view, both Darwin and Engels failed to make fundamental distinction between man and animals though explained where human have come from (34). With reference to Darwin's concept of biological selection, Nie places much emphasis on its counterpart: ethical selection. Biological selection, for Nie, is only first step to help human being to be who they are in biological sense. What truly differentiates human animals is second step, ethical selection (35), which helps to endow human with reason and ethical consciousness, and thus eventually turns them into ethical beings. …

Reflections and Insights: The Year in Portugal

Reflections and InsightsThe Year in Portugal Cláudia Faria (bio) In Portugal, the tradition of life writing is still embryonic. Catherine Dumas, Portuguese teacher at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, argues that there is a tendency to include the writing of diaries in fictional literature and she stresses that in general, these two genres are frequently confused with one another. In fact, only recently, scholars in academia have started to include memoirs, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, and other forms of life writing in their curricula. It is also important to note that the first study on letter writing in Portugal dates only from 1965, thus demonstrating how late the theme has caught the attention of specialists. In fact, the work of Andrée Crabbé Rocha, A epistolografia em Portugal, is still essential, hence revealing how little else has been added in terms of critics. This proves that the theme continues to be not only out of academia but also out of the canon. However, Clara Rocha, author of Máscaras de Narciso, argues that genres like diaries, memoirs, letters, and biographies can be seen in Portuguese literature since ancient times, while the same is not applicable to autobiographies. If during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries auto/biographical texts were produced by nuns, priests, and by an elite, in the twentieth century, Portuguese authors have put out auto/biographical texts in the form of diaries and memoirs. Maria Alzira Seixo, professor at Lisbon University, has no doubt that the diary of the Portuguese writer Vergilio Ferreira, Contracorrente, issued in 1980, marks a turning point, being hence acknowledge as a courageous and challenging approach of the author rather than a literary tendency. Since then, the diary became fashionable in Portugal. As far as diaries by women are concerned, Clara Rocha’s Máscaras de Narciso, dated from 1992 is considered a pioneering work. Other Portuguese writers, realizing the pleasures of the genre and, in particular, the opportunity to avoid or challenge regulations, as well as its power to resist and forget, have also shown an [End Page 648] inclination to these types of texts. Portuguese author Irene Lisboa points to the wonders of writing about nothing important, and how free she feels to be able to get away from other people’s eyes. Portuguese author, Maria Gabriela Llanson, explains that keeping a diary is like being at her own house, but with the feeling of coming to pay a visit to someone else. In reality, the Portuguese market is still saturated with translated biographies and autobiographies of notable people, mainly politicians, musicians, or film stars from outside Portugal. First-person texts of common citizens are still rare. We have to take into consideration that diaries and letters are still considered paraliterary texts and hence scholarly interest is little. Paulo de Medeiros in “The Diary and Portuguese Women Writers,” suggests that diaries are in fact a non-genre, which explains why there are so few studies on them. Abel Barros Baptista, in his article “O Espelho perguntador,” argues that the discussion behind the reason to write diaries and first-person texts should not be the main goal of literary criticism, even less to prove whether these texts are literary or not. Assuming that there is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction, and although the genre has been considered delicate if not doomed, we believe the discussion should go further to find out why the writing of life, of ordinary and plain days, tends to makes us feel uncomfortable and, in particular, why in Portugal the status of life writing is still marginal. The writing of the self, in its varied forms and as suggested by Catherine Dumas, responds to the urgent and contemporary quest for self-determination, either as a notable and extraordinary struggle or as a plain and ordinary account. This is where its relevance lies. This is the challenge. Even if there is an almost natural fragility to “inscribing the daily,” as the title of Bunker and Huff’s book indicates, or a certain unraveling in the self-quest, and even as critics continue to relegate life narratives to silence, the truth is that writing random notes on a...

La Crítica genética: un marco teórico sobre la disciplina, objetivos y método

El primer objetivo de la crítica genética es reconstruir la marcha de la escritura, pero a la vez intenta desentrañar la red de significaciones que se va configurando; desarrolla para ello dos tipos principales de actividades: la edición genética de textos modernos y el emprendimiento de diversas orien­taciones interpretativas. El examen de los procesos escriturales demuestra que en ese espacio late un perpetuo enfrentamiento entre unidad y diversidad, equilibrio e inestabilidad, y esa oposición dialéctica entre la permanencia y el cambio –inherente de la naturaleza de los procesos culturales– acompaña a los estudios filológicos desde sus orígenes: la crítica genética puede ser considerada, entonces, un avatar moderno de la Filología.

Current Trends in Old Testament Textual Criticism

Abstract There are some exciting trends currently underway in OT textual criticism. The purpose of this article is both to summarize these trends and to suggest a way forward in a few cases. Three areas that will be addressed in this article are (1) the formation of the Hebrew text, (2) the goal of OT textual criticism, and (3) a diplomatic Hebrew text versus an eclectic Hebrew text. The Hebrew text of the OT has an amazing heritage that is well worth tracing through the process of textual criticism.

Using a higher criticism statistic to detect modest effects in a genome-wide study of rheumatoid arthritis

In high-dimensional studies such as genome-wide association studies, the correction for multiple testing in order to control total type I error results in decreased power to detect modest effects. We present a new analytical approach based on the higher criticism statistic that allows identification of the presence of modest effects. We apply our method to the genome-wide study of rheumatoid arthritis provided in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Problem 1 data set. There is evidence for unknown bias in this study that could be explained by the presence of undetected modest effects. We compared the asymptotic and empirical thresholds for the higher criticism statistic. Using the asymptotic threshold we detected the presence of modest effects genome-wide. We also detected modest effects using 90th percentile of the empirical null distribution as a threshold; however, there is no such evidence when the 95th and 99th percentiles were used. While the higher criticism method suggests that there is some evidence for modest effects, interpreting individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms with significant higher criticism statistics is of undermined value. The goal of higher criticism is to alert the researcher that genetic effects remain to be discovered and to promote the use of more targeted and powerful studies to detect the remaining effects.

“Most Beautiful among Women”: Feminist/Womanist Contributions to Reading the Song of Songs

The goal of this essay is to explore some of the primary contributions to the interpretation of Song of Songs made by feminist interpreters. An important goal of feminist biblical criticism is to provide interpretations of biblical texts that allow everyone, regardless of gender, class, or race, to find a place of belonging, both in Scripture and in the world. Feminist interpretation has highlighted and celebrated the prevalence of female characters, voices, and roles in the Song of Songs, as well as the egalitarian nature of the lovers' interaction with each other. It also asks readers of the Song to reconsider their own prejudices against people who look or act differently or who come from a different social class, and invites us to think about the frequent assumption that “nice girls” are not sexual beings. The Song of Songs presents a picture of what it means to have power that differs from the more familiar patriarchal representations of power elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Finally, feminist interpretation of the Song of Songs leads us to revisit other biblical texts, such as Genesis 2–3, and read them in new ways.

It's All about Variants: A Variant-Conscious Approach to New Testament Textual Criticism

The goal of New Testament textual criticism would appear to be simple enough: to restore the original text written by each author of the New Testament books. Upon examination, however, the notion of simplicity vanishes immediately and each of the key terms here—“restore,” “original,” “text,” and “author”—has its problematic aspects, but more importantly the simply stated goal itself turns out to be inadequate. Grist for the text-critical mill consists of textual readings or variants, which for the relatively small collection of writings called the New Testament are not merely in the hundreds or thousands, or even the tens of thousands, but run to perhaps a third of a million. They stem from the nearly 5,500 Greek manuscripts, some 10,000 versional manuscripts, and innumerable patristic citations of New Testament passages.

Securitization theory and securitization studies

Opposed to the recently fashionable ‘moral and ethical’ criticism levelled against Ole Wæver's securitization theory this article argues that such criticism fundamentally misconceives the analytical goal of securitization theory, which is namely to offer a tool for practical security analysis. In arguing that being political (critical) on the part of the analyst has no bearing on the type of practical security analysis that can be done using securitization theory, this article proposes that the analytical goal of such criticism and that of securitization theory are incommensurable; in the process rendering obsolete this kind of criticism of securitization theory. By way of reconciling securitization theory with its critics, however, this article takes up Wæver's suggestion of wider securitization studies in which moral and ethical criticism, as well as being political, can play a supplementary role in the analysis of securitization theory.

Critical Security Studies and World Politics

Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Edited by Ken Booth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 336p. $62.00 cloth, $24.50 paper.Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.

Intention and Ogden Nash

One of the most vexed terms in literary criticism is "intention." William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley tried to minimize its role in our critical vocabulary by their essay "The Intentional Fallacy"; and for the New Critics, led by the example and precepts of Cleanth Brooks, intention was a forbidden topic. 1 But forbidding them seldom weakens the popularity of ideas any more than it does the popularity of human activities, and literary intention has enjoyed an active critical life since then. For some critics the author's intention can be equated with the meaning of a literary text, and so in their view recovering that intention becomes the primary goal of literary criticism. 2 Critics with a psychoanalytical bent have enlarged the territory of the term to incorporate unconscious intention, and social critics, including New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, have often attributed intention to a social entity, such as the power elite of a society, or even the society as a whole.

Wordsworth's "Solitaries" and the Problem of Literary Reference

Anyone familiar with Wordsworth criticism of the past decade or so will be aware of its indebtedness a particular account of literary reference. According Jerome McCann, the question of referentiality essential recent critical attempts at reconstitut[ing] sociohistorical methods and interests as the heart of literary studies.' Such methods and interests, he argues in his essay, Point of Reference, when not entirely repudiated by formalist or text-centered critical approaches, have been consistently oversimplified by impoverished theory of language and literary reference, which McGann associates with the empiricist belief in a 'solid' correspondence between 'literal names' and 'visible physical objects.'2 For McGann, then, as for many contemporary Wordsworthians, an enriched account of literary reference stands as the central theoretical goal of modern historicist criticism. But a peculiar and characteristic problem of reference hovers over the entirety of McGann's essay, which focuses less on the relationships between literary language and the world than on the semantic status of discursive referents or particulars within the broader ideological which they belong. To recover the concept of referentiality, he writes, ... begin by reminding ourselves that 'facts' are not mere data, objects, or monads; they are heuristic isolates which bring into focus some more or less complex network of human events and relations.3 And, throughout his essay, McGann suggests that an understanding of such networks will somehow provide us with an adequate concept of literary reference. A work of literature, we are told, has reference to a totality of human changes in all its diverse and particular manifestations, a process of dynamic totalization that extends well beyond a particular author's explicit frame of... narrativization: What we must see, McGann insists, is that [literary] works ... have reference ... some more or less comprehensive aspects of the past, and the present and the future as well.4 Within the field of Wordsworth studies, at least, some such account would seem have fulfilled the broader institutional role envisioned

Theory and I: Multivalence of the word

At the end of the brief but ever-so-provocative introduction to her book of essays, Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory, Mary Lydon writes that the subject of her essays is, in a Barthesian appropriation, "The ory and I" (10). Rhetorically endowing from the outset the alternately in viting and intimidating domain of literary theory with a persona, Lydon thus sets the stage for a series of encounters among literary theory, texts, writers and readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Lydon's articulation, however, "theory" connotes far more than the works of (mostly French) scholars opening up the parameters of literary scholarship since the late 1950s. Rather, it comes to include a wide range of authorial sub jects who must confront their own relationship to the task of writing, threat ening and irresistible though it is to them and, above all, to any attempt at fashioning one's subjectivity. Likewise, Lydon's "I"?the partner to this relationship with theory?is complex but inclusive. Like "theory," Lydon's "I" is also a persona or many personae, caught up in a variety of compli cated relationships to the world beyond the self?at times personal, gen dered, familial, cerebral, academic and institutional. These are essays, Lydon writes, "in which I venture to identify myself (in the sense Barthes gives to the term [identify]) with a number of great writers whose recherche I take to be, like mine, 'the narrative of a desire to write' " (10). In a move that challenges the age-old subordination of criticism to literature, she posits: "But suppose for a moment that 'writing' is precisely what the critic passionately wants to do, that 'writing' is the occulted goal of all literary criticism" (7). So that despite the difficulty of many of these essays, Lydon's "I" invites her readers, too, to situate them selves in this important critical project, in which theory becomes writing and "reading" theory becomes an activity in which the stakes for one's own subjectivity are immense.

Public access: literary theory and American cultural politics

In the years of the Reagan-Bush era, the controversy over erupted on American campuses in the 1980s, spreading to the mainstream media as right-wing pundits like Dinesh D'Souza and Roger Kimball prosecuted their publicity campaign against progressive academics. Michael Berube's brilliant new book explains how and why the political correctness furore emerged, and how the right's apparent stranglehold on popular opinion about the academy can be loosened. Traversing the terrain of contemporary cultural criticism, Berube examines the state of cultural studies, the significance of postmodernism, the continuing debate over multicultural curricula, and the recent revisions of literary history in American studies. Also included is Berube's witty and self-deprecating autobiographical reflection on why interpretive theory has emerged as an indispensable part of education in the humanities over the past decade. Public Access insists that academics must exercise more responsibility towards the publics who underwrite but often misunderstand their work and its significance. Taken seriously as a potential audience, Berube argues, such publics can be weaned from their present inclination to believe the distortions peddled by the right's ideologues. The goal of public access criticism is not just a better environment for teachers and scholars, but a world in which education itself achieves its proper place in a society committed to equality of opportunity and true critical thinking.

Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies

Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies

Pedagogical justification for a theory‐method distinction in rhetorical criticism

Though most rhetorical critics agree that theoretical illumination should be the primary goal of criticism, disagreement exists as to the proper relationship between theory and method. Some scholars argue that theory and method are merged in rhetorical criticism. Others maintain that theory and method ought to be distinguished. This paper argues that a theory‐method merger benefits criticism, but that a theory‐method distinction is justified on pedagogical grounds. An analysis of Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto illustrates how a theory‐method distinction can inform rhetorical criticism.