Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:09:26.634Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Speech Acts and Social Action

Mark Twain and the Politics of Literary Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Forrest G. Robinson
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Get access

Summary

During the past decade or more, the field of literary studies has been a notoriously embattled one. The battles within and around it, sometimes referred to as “the culture wars ” or “the canon wars, ” have expressed in various ways the deepening identity conflict not only of this academic discipline but of the contemporary American society and culture of which it is a part. In literary studies, the conflict has centered around an issue that may be broadly characterized as the politics of literary performance. This issue has arisen out of powerful challenges - often posed by women and ethnic minorities, who have only lately entered the professoriate in significant numbers - to the dominant view among academic critics since the Second World War that literary works, their authors, and the activity of evaluating and interpreting them transcend, or at least are separable from, matters of partisan politics and considerations of the marketplace. With increasing influence, the challengers of this view have insisted on the political and economic determinants, values, and consequences of “literary performance,” a term I mean to encompass both what literary works express and, more generally, what their authors and their interpreters do. The practices of literary authorship and literary instruction and criticism, that is, are themselves kinds of literary performance. And according to the discipline's recent insurgents (now, arguably, its elite), literary studies must interrogate the political conditions and capacities not only of literary objects but of these practices as well.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×