The arts and sciences of criticism

Bibliographic Information

The arts and sciences of criticism

edited by David Fuller and Patricia Waugh

Oxford University Press, 1999

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This collection reflects on developments in criticism which bear on a debate between different modes of knowledge: a science model and its place in the university versus other ways of conceiving knowledge for which the arts have traditionally been seen as vehicles. Discussion ranges widely with contributions from outside the literary academy, including essays by the novelists Doris Lessing and David Lodge. All the essays are concerned with what literature, and therefore criticism, is or aims to be. Several are concerned with a specifically aesthetic way of knowing, the value of which lies in its very resistance to scientific models of knowledge. The answers about how literature can resist such models, and what kinds of knowing best respond to the distinctive nature of aesthetic experience, are varied. The collection also addresses the consequences for literary criticism of the politically-driven critique which has recently undermined traditional concepts of truth and knowledge in both arts and sciences. And finally it asks whether professional criticism should be a deepened extension of the sense-making activity of ordinary intelligent reading, or whether it should be a purely objective study, analogous to other scientific forms of knowledge studied in an academic context.

Table of Contents

  • PART I: CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
  • PART II: CRITICISM AND THE AESTHETIC
  • PART III: CRITICISM AND THE ETHICAL

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Details
  • NCID
    BA41854179
  • ISBN
    • 0198186398
  • Country Code
    uk
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Oxford ; Tokyo
  • Pages/Volumes
    x, 265 p.
  • Size
    23 cm
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