Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T05:26:34.164Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Presidential Address 1989: Mediating the Work: Or, The Legitimate Aims of Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Victor Brombert
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is not always easy to communicate with the larger community and the general public. In the field of literary studies our times betray a deep malaise. Belletristic exercises have been discredited as frivolous and elitist. The very underpinnings of any critical discourse are being scrutinized. What is criticism, and what for? To some, it is an analysis of functions, to others an elaboration and testing of theories, to still others a study of the modes of production and reception, while to not a few it has an ideological thrust of its own. There are those who nourish even more grandiose ambitions—who see criticism as a means of rethinking or undermining Western metaphysics and of shaking the foundations of a logocentric and anthropocentric cultural consciousness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , May 1990 , pp. 391 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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.)

References

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Epic and Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination of M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Holquist, Michael. Trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 3–40.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.Google Scholar
Blin, Georges. La cribleuse de blá: La critique. Paris: Corti, 1968.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. “Poetic Crossing: Rhetoric and Psychology.”Google Scholar
Georgia Review 30 (1976): 495–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Mesnard, Author of the Quixote.”Google Scholar
Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964. 36–44.Google Scholar
Brombert, Victor. The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliot, T.S. “The Function of Criticism.” Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, 1932. 12–22.Google Scholar
Eliot, T.S. “Studies in Contemporary Criticism.” Egoist 5 (1918): 113–33.Google Scholar
Eliot, T.S.The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1933.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Vol. 2. Paris: Conard, 1910.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. La correspondance de Flaubert: Etude et rápertoire critique. Ed. Carlut, Charles. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. Œuvres de jeunesse inádites. Vol. 3. Paris: Conard, 1910.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph. “Erich Kahler and The Predicament of Our Age.” New Criterion Apr. 1989: 15–19.Google Scholar
Gödel, Kurt. “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia mathematica and Related Systems I.” Collected Works. Ed. Feferman, Solomon et al. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. 144–95.Google Scholar
Hugo, Victor. William Shakespeare. Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1969. Vol. 12 of Œuvres complètes. 18 vols. 1967–70.Google Scholar
Mack, Maynard. “The Charles Homer Haskins Lecture: The Life of Learning.” ACLS Newsletter 34.1 (1983): 2–15.Google Scholar
Malraux, André. L'espoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1937.Google Scholar
Proust, Marcel. Le temps retrouvá. Paris: Gallimard, 1927.Google Scholar