Modern Critical Theory Research Articles

Recasting Critical Theory: Veblen, Deconstruction, and the Theory-Praxis Gap

This paper contends that Thorstein Veblen’s economic and social thought constitute a remarkably advanced form of critical theory. This “evolutionary critical theory” shares the goals, methods, assumptions, and critiques of thought associated with modern critical theory as it has developed out of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. However, it is more comprehensive in its critical approach, denying both that emancipation and responsive democratic pluralism are necessarily adaptive, and that they necessarily provide the “fittest” institutions. In contrast to other critical theory, Veblen’s emphasis on non-teleological and non-deterministic social evolution constitutes a dynamic social construction that closes the theory-praxis gap and explains why historical change is not consistently emancipatory.

BOOK REVIEW: William Myers.THE PRESENCE OF PERSONS: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998.

This is an unexpected kind of book. It is both interesting and unfashionable, strong-willed and unpolemical, confident and professional, and at the same time open to broad questions. While it is a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects, it has a coherence that, I am sure, William Myers was hoping his readers would find. However diverse the subject and different the judgments, these essays speak with a single voice. The presence of Myers, the person, in this text is a central piece of the book's evidence. In implying that his own presence is a crucial fact of the book, Myers engages and disputes the dominant directions of modern critical theory and empiricist evolutionary science that the "self" is entirely constructed, a mere unstable set of neural connections or possible positions. He takes on the secular, materialist, rationalist, empiricist tradition that develops from René Descartes to Daniel Dennett. And of all the surprises of this surprising collection, perhaps the most surprising of all is that the presiding intellectual spirit behind Myers's criticism and philosophy is, of all people, John Henry Newman, though Edmund Husserl also plays a dominant role. In a book that is rather sophisticated about Jacques Derrida and Dennet and Jacques Monod and Georges Bataille and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is, to say the least, unexpected that nineteenth-century English thinkers and theologians play so decisive a role.

WHY SCATTING IS LIKE SPEAKING IN TONGUES: POST-MODERN REFLECTIONS ON JAZZ, PENTECOSTALISM AND 'AFRICOSMYSTICISM'

This essay considers the relationship between two areas of African American cultural expression: music and religion. It posits that they are joined by an African aesthetic that is best termed 'non-mimetic'. This non-mimetic discourse is understood by modern critical theory as a post-modern sensibility which emphasises the creative, spontaneous, abstract and mystical dimensions ofhuman consciousness. The authors use examples from modern jazz (bebop artists) and pentecostalism (glossolalia) to carry the argument that African Amencan culture was particularly sensitive to the transformation from the modern to the post-modern era.

Shakespeare's tragedies and modern critical theory

This work contributes to the current debate between traditional humanist approaches to Shakespeare and newer modes of analysis informed by Marxism, poststructuralism, and feminism. The book offers an accessible introduction to the main critical positions now represented in Shakespeare studies, enabling readers unfamiliar with critical theory to gain a purchase on the ideas.

The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater (review)

380BCom, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter 1997) examination. Occasionally, alas (though fortunately not often), a more or less traditional reading ofthe play in question is merely tricked out in a few theoretical furbelows; the analysis in such cases does not really grow out of or depend upon the theory, which could have been dispensed with, without noticeably affecting the conclusions reached. As an introduction to modern theoretical approaches to the comedia, this volume has a couple of other problems as well. Some ofthe theoretical approaches illustrated are no longer exactly on the cutting edge of modern critical theory. And several ofthe essays, in somewhat different form, have already appeared elsewhere. Nevertheless, I would recommend the collection , despite the drawbacks. The lucidity of the theoretical synopses, and the cogency ofsome ofthe individual textual analyses, would make the volume highly useful in any graduate class on the Golden Age comedia. And the essays' overall, albeit sometimes implicit, call on students of the comedia to keep abreast of developments in critical theory seems likely to remain necessary and timely. Barbara E. Kurtz Illinois State University Stroud, Matthew D. The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1996. Cloth. 242 pp. Of the many theorists whose works inform contemporary literary criticism , including that of Hispanists, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan may well have the most forbidding reputation. Relatively few Golden Age scholars have ventured into this intimidating intellectual realm. Students of the comedia can thus profit from Matthew Stroud's The Play in the Mirror and will surely welcome both Stroud's ability to articulate Lacanian ideas methodically and his insightful application ofthem to several works. The Play in the Mirror's brief opening chapter enumerates the fundamental premises of Lacan's formulation of the subject, then in chapter 2 Stroud elaborates upon and demonstrates Lacanian subjectivity through the journeys toward greater self-knowledge experienced by Calderón's characters in La vida es sueño. Through the process of signification, they all must break free of the egoistic imaginary order and submit themselves to the symbolic order represented by civilization in order to play their proper roles Reviews381 in society; in doing so, they must accept the Other's desire as their own and act accordingly, as the play's concluding reconciliations and marriages demonstrate. Chapter 3, entitled "Love and Desire," explains how both these emotions result from the inescapable lack at the core of the subject. Desire is the attempt to achieve individual completion by (again) adopting the Other's desire as one's own, while love is the attempt to become whole by being loved. Due to inevitable conflicts between the imaginary, symbolic, and real, neither goal can ever be fully realized. The characters in La dama boba and El caballero de Olmedo, in search of wholeness, do not understand why contentment eludes them. Only the security of the symbolic order offers an apparent escape from this dilemma, as can be seen in La dama boba's concluding — and possibly less than completely fulfilling — marriages . For Stroud, however, this comedy is less illustrative of desire's true trajectory than the tragic El caballero de Olmedo, in which Alonso and Inés's passion conflicts with the symbolic order as embodied by her father's intention that she marry Rodrigo; desire cannot be satisfied in either the imaginary or symbolic realms and leads inexorably to death. Chapter 4, "Honor, Ethics, and Tragedy," continues to explore the insufficiency of the symbolic order to satisfy or control desire. Masculine honor in the Golden Age comedia, Stroud points out, partakes paradoxically of both the imaginary and symbolic registers, on one hand egoistically asserting individual autonomy and on the other submitting unquestioningly to various cultural imperatives. It is this paradox which is embodied by El castigo sin venganza's Duke ofFerrara, an egoistic individual expected to represent the symbolic order ofhis realm. The play's final tragedy results from the intersection of these registers and their imperatives when the Duke confronts desire in the form of his wife and illegitimate son's treasonous adultery . A secreto agravio, secreta venganza raises for Stroud the question of prudence, a symbolic virtue which...

Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction

For the most part, modern literary history - particularly the history of twentieth-century fiction - is regularly abbreviated to an all-too-simple tale of dynastic successions: Realism, the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century narrative, was supplanted by modernism, its inevitable successor, which, due to its own inherent limitations, in turn gave way to postmodernism. Despite our thoroughgoing suspicion of origins, we can assign plausible dates for the inauguration of each movement; more dialectically, we can point to the internal deviations and contradictions that mark the transformation from one movement to the other: Edwardian writers Ford, Conrad, and Forster, accompanied by the earlier D. H. Lawrence, provide the fulcrum that impels literature from one mode to the next. On the other end of modernism, Brian McHale has designated the very moments in Beckett's trilogy that demarcate the transition from modernism to postmodernism (Postmodernist Fiction 12-13).(1) This narrative of modern literary history is not of course limited to British and Irish writers. In any number of national literatures, the individual names vary while the general pattern remains the same. Realists like the Goncourts, Tolstoy, Galdos, Mann, Tagore, and Tanizaki are succeeded by the modernists Proust, Biely, Cela, Broch, Rao, and Kawabata, who in their turn become displaced by the postmodernists Robbe-Grillet, Kundera, Rios, Grass, Rushdie, and Banana Yoshimoto. In what follows, I will focus my investigation on the British version of this suggested historical progression, though my critique is intended to be applicable on a much wider scale.(2) It might also be pointed out that the target of this paper is not so much actual histories of modern literature, a number of which pay close attention to their subject's nuances, as what I suggest is a near ubiquitous idee recu that circulates unchallenged throughout the profession.(3) The main problem with the standard narrative of modern literary history is precisely its narrative features: a distinct origin, a series of causally connected events in a linear sequence, a teleological progression culminating in the present, the absence of unconnected or distracting subplots, the unspoken but uncontested male domination of narrative agency, and the unproblematic closure implied by this version of history.(4) There is also the inevitable moral that this structure lends itself to, that postmodernism is a superior representation of human experience, more recent and therefore more appropriate, if not also more ideologically responsible. Each of these aspects of the standard account of modern literary history derives more from the conventional structure of traditional narratives than from a careful assessment of the radical heterogeneity and untimeliness of twentieth-century literary practice? A hard look at both the texts and the histories that purport to circumscribe them can quickly reveal just how misleading streamlined conceptions of literary history can be. There is of course another master narrative of modern literary dealings that is even more stark, uncompromising, and relentlessly teleological than the one I have just outlined, and that is the history of modern critical theory. The irreversible sequence humanism [greater than] formalism [greater than] poststructuralism has become so entrenched as to be virtually unassailable, and this entrenchment probably seems so inevitable in part because of associations between each literary theory and a corresponding type of narrative practice. Humanism, perhaps most prestigiously in the form of Lukacs's Marxist humanism, became the spokesman for and beneficiary of the achievements of the major texts of realism. Formalism, on the other hand, was to a large extent invented by the original practitioners of modernism (along with their early advocates) in order to explain its aims, aesthetics, and distinctive accomplishments. Postmodernism has in turn found a happy union with poststructuralism; it is no accident that Derrida valorizes authors like Blanchot and the tel quel novelists. …

Erasmus and dolet on the ethics of imitation and the hermeneutic imperative

This article examines an area of interest (the rhetorical use ofdissimulatio) shared by two of the most implacable adversaries in the humanist quarrel over the imitation of Ciceronian style, Erasmus and Etienne Dolet. This question is explored in the context of Erasmus's commitment to the moral dimensions ofimitatio (given his Christian hermeneutic), and Dolet's convictions concerning the distinction between artistic endeavor and moral accountability. Some concluding thoughts are offered as to how such views reflect a Renaissance epistemology of language as communication, a perspective that continues to influence important aspects of modern critical and social theory.

Orphans of Petrarch: poetry and theory in the Spanish Renaissance

In Spain as elsewhere, Renaissance poets transformed the lyric tradition by using Petrarch as a source of poetic renewal. But political unity and military hegemony, coupled with a sense of cultural inferiority and an obsession with ethnic purity, made Spain different. Drawing on modern critical theory, this text offers an exposition of the development of Renaissance poetics. Grounded in both philology and cultural theory, the book integrates the Spanish difference into an understanding of Renaissance lyric as a European phenomenon.

Confronting the Postmodern Bull

This book examines the way in which depictions of post‐modernity, urban social theory and theories of racism interrelate in their comprehension of the cities of late‐capitalist societies, cities the world over, that is, wherever populations of black people are found. That portrayal is a quite unique approach to such burning issues as the manner in which black people assert claims to self‐ identity against racist projections of who they are, of circuits of social control, and social systems reproduction. Moreover questions as to whether the concept of ethnicity divides the oppressed or unites them; whether the categories of race and community are dangerous fictions; what relations there are between the capitalist democratic state and groups suffering racial discrimination within them; and whether critiques of post‐ modern critical social theory clarify or mystify analysis of racism, are all ably considered with unusual perspicuity.

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism Audrey Beisel (bio) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) John Stephens . Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. New York: Longman, 1992. The first priority is to understand how the ideology of any given book can be located. Above all, such an understanding is important for teachers, especially primary school teachers and English specialists. Their task is to teach children how to read . . . so . . . that child will not be at the mercy of what she reads. Peter Hollindale, "Ideology and the Children's Book," Signal 55 (1988): 19. To what extent does contemporary children's literature criticism infantilize rather than politicize the child? To what extent does it articulate a classic power struggle (this time over language) between the haves (adults) and the have-nots (children)? John Stephens's Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction, an intellectually challenging book that uses many modern critical theories to explore the efficacious relationship among language, ideology, and children's literature, raises a multiplicity of (perhaps unanswerable) questions. Is the book too difficult, too theoretical? For whom was the book written? What is its intended audience? What is its relation to the child reader, ideal or real? Does Language and Ideology, and other similar critical studies—Nodelman (1992) and Hunt (1991)—articulate the kind of contradiction Jacqueline Rose eloquently spoke of in The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, the fact that "Peter Pan . . . gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child" (1). And if children's literature criticism is likewise an impossibility because it speaks in an unspeakably difficult language that only literary specialists might decode, precisely what language must young people be armed with in order to protect themselves in an increasingly violent new world order? What language will produce a more equable redistribution of the world's resources, from the elites to the masses? Where is the critical language—of resistance, struggle, and empowerment—that politicizes rather than infantilizes young people, and [End Page 220] what is the role of the intellectual Left in the dissemination of that critical language for the young? Such questions belittle neither John Stephens's work in general nor Language and Ideology in particular. Stephens has made several valuable contributions to children's literature in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly and in Children's Literature (1993). Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction continues those worthwhile contributions. Stephens's thesis and overall aim—clearly set out in his introduction—is an important one, particularly in these days of political correctness: language, ideology, and children's literature are intimately related, he argues. Further, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable: ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language" (8). Childhood is a function of adulthood meaning. Adulthood is a function of childhood meaning. Both are a function of language. Moreover, we would argue, they are related not in any kind of unspoken relationship, as the gay and lesbian children's literature that articulated the egalitarian and thus controversial vision of New York's Rainbow Coalition curriculum dramatically showed. Whether it be a liberal or Leftist agenda looking to articulate a socialist vision through the lens of a humane and caring curriculum or a conservative, right-wing rejection of both that vision and its humane embodiment in a democratic curriculum, the triumvirate of language, ideology, and children's literature shapes and organizes the socialization of the child into the adult. Young people must know that while children's literature is immensely enjoyable as art, it is also immensely powerful as ideology—what Althusser called an ideological state apparatus. Subsequent chapters in Language and Ideology, though often difficult ironically because of Stephens's wide-ranging use of complex theoretical terminology, nonetheless convincingly argue that, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable" (8). For example, in chapter one, "Ideology, Discourse and Narrative Fiction," Stephens incorporates the theoretical work of Aidan Chambers, Peter Hollindale (the summary of Hollindale's essay on ideology is good), Wolfgang Iser, and Wayne Booth to discuss the relationship between narrative and ideology in Steven Kellog's The...

Australian Criticism in ‘Transition’

About a decade ago, Howard Felperin and a few others were pointing out quite correctly that Australian literary scholars had generally ignored modern critical theory. Recently in the Weekend Australian (9-10 January 1993: Review 7) Imre Salusinszky announced, with breathtaking inaccuracy, that literary studies in this country are dominated by a coterie of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) which has 'struggled to keep Australian literary scholarship free and pure of the influence of "foreign" ideas'. In the eight books under discussion there are about 130 essays which were nurtured in the climate of controversy of the 1980s, and which reflect and document the disruptions and reorientations of a decade of critical transition. Already some, even among the best, have a slight smell of last week's bananas in the school cloakroom - rather familiar, a little old, but inescapably present. These essays rehearse and reflect, implicitly or explicitly, again and again, the Great Debate between traditional criticism and modern theory. Many were originally published, or presented as conference papers, between 1978 and 1990. The exceptions, in (Un)Common Ground, Aspects of Australian Fiction, Reconnoitres and a few in Security of Allusion, are original essays, but are conditioned by the critical climate of the 1980s, and reflect and illustrate the environment of particular literature departments.

Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime

William Blake called himself a Artist and acknowledged his own power to create Most Sublime Poetry. of Eternity reveals the fundamental importance of the term in a defining of Blake's poetic achievement. This first full-length study of Blake and the sublime demonstrates that a sophisticated theory of sublimity permeates his writings, serving him as a personal poetics, a framework in which the difficulties and unusual strategies of the works find their rationale. Vincent De Luca combines historically grounded source study with insights from modern critical theories of textuality to identify Blake's two opposing conceptions of sublimity--a sublime of obscurity, terror, and material power and one of determinate, concentrated intellectual design. De Luca examines the interplay between these two modes from differing perspectives--theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. As the perspectives widen, they embrace many of the speculative systems of Blake's time and reveal these systems as various displaced modalities of an underlying sublime discourse. Words of Eternity is one of the dozen or so most important books ever written about Blake's poetry. De Luca provides a wealth of new insights on every page.--Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside With the context that this book supplies, we take a quantum leap in the sense we can make of Blake's project. De Luca opens our eyes to a Blake, and a sublime, that will never again be the same for us.--Nelson Hilton, University of Georgia

John Fowles's fiction and the poetics of postmodernism

This work undertakes a close study of the narrative techniques in the fiction of John Fowles. Salami attempts to place Fowles's fiction in the context of modern critical theory and narrative poetics.

Ironies of Ulysses

This book brings a new perspective to study of Joyce's great novel. The author argues case for employing concept of irony as an explicatory tool in study of Ulyssesoand indeed of whole Joycean canon. Moreover he uses modern critical theory to enlarge our understanding of irony itself and to suggest how such theory has an appropriate object of attention in Joyce. Wright defines irony as the use of a 'false' textual surface to direct a reader's attention towards initially concealed premises or implications. Thus an author lays a partly false trail, but one which usually leads towards a more authenthic or appropriate understanding of subject under discussion. Joyce's work is full of this kind of semantic counterpoint. Indeed, it is essential to his whole comic method. Both Portrait of Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses are full of ironic contrasts between desire for order, certainty and stability on one hand and random meetings and perverse associations. The author argues that Joyce's other favorite techniques of ambiguity and punning are so closely related to that of irony that all three may legitimately be considered as a unity, specially formed and deployed by Joyce in his mature work.; Contents: Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Local Ironies; Single-Episode Ironies; Inter-Episode Ironies; Ironies from Early Joyce; Ironies from Homer to Shakespeare; Bibliography; Index.

Reappraisals: shifting alignments in postwar critical theory

Reappraisals is a provocative account of the development of modern critical theory in Germany and the United States. Focusing on the period since World War II, Peter Uwe Hohendahl explores key debates on the function of critical theory, illuminating the diverse positions and alliances among the participants. Bringing together six essays, as well as new introductory and concluding chapters, Hohendahl interprets and subjects to critical scrutiny many of the central ideas of the Frankfurt School. He first maps the trajectory of neomarxist criticism in Germany to the 1980s. Individual chapters then focus on the work of Georg Lukacs, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jurgen Habermas, and on such issues as the politicization of German criticism after 1965 under the influence of the Frankfurt School.

An extremum theory of the residual functional in Sobolev spacesW m,p(ω)

In the present paper the concept and properties of the residual functional in Sobolev space are investigated. The weak compactness, force condition, lower semi-continuity and convex of the residual functional are proved. In Sobolev space, the minimum principle of the residual functional is proposed. The minimum existence theoreom for J(u)=0 is given by the modern critical point theory. And the equivalence theorem or five equivalence forms for the residual functional equation are also proved.

From Criticism to Construction in Modern Critical Legal Theory

The American Critical Legal Studies Movement stands as the most influential critical movement in law since Legal Realism, already exerting a subtle yet pervasive influence on the direction of scholarship in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Yet alongside the emergence of Critical Legal Studies, there is a proliferation of European Critical Theory of law which has its origins in the writings of the contemporary German social theorists Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann.' The notable characteristic of these modem critical legal theories is their aim to move beyond criticism to the construction of novel conceptions of law which demonstrate the capacity of law both to effect and regulate significant social change. Unlike their predecessors, these modem theorists attempt to show that programmes of social change may be engineered by developing the potential for such change that lies within existing legal rules and doctrines, and not by other non-legal means. Accordingly, this paper does not endeavour to describe the critical element of contemporary critical legal theory but rather to evaluate its success in moving beyond criticism to the required conceptions of law. I shall attempt to show that this reconstructive aim may be accomplished only if two intricate hurdles are overcome. For want of less awkward terms, I call these hurdles 'legal nihilism' and 'circularity'. I shall further contend that the principal solution to these two obstacles is to establish that law has what I shall call 'transformative potential'. The problem of legal nihilism takes two forms.2 Firstly, it manifests itself in a loss of hope in the possibility of moving beyond criticism of law to the creation of a new conception of law. Secondly, it is represented by scepticism of the law's

Ezra Pound as literary critic

Bringing some of the insights of modern critical theory to bear on a great deal of information about Pound's activities as a literary critic (some of it made available only recently), K.K. Ruthven provides a provocative re-reading of a major modernist writer who dominated the discourse of modernism.

Modern culture and critical theory: art, politics, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School

Modern culture and critical theory: art, politics, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School

Poetics against Itself: On the Self-Destruction of Modern Scientific Criticism

Modern critical theory is commonly thought of as a collection of diverse methods, schools, systems, and approaches. There is, however, a significant pattern in the diversity. This pattern is generated by the conflict between the widespread effort of twentieth-century theorists to make criticism scientific and the internal resistance to that effort presented by the hermeneutic impulse. The scientific tradition is characterized and unified by a set of common theoretical principles and by a common sequence of transformations that each school within it undergoes. The result of these transformations is that every proposed scientific model for criticism changes into an interpretive method and the project of scientific criticism is subverted.