Modernism and the critical spirit

書誌事項

Modernism and the critical spirit

Eugene Goodheart ; with a new introduction by the author

Transaction Publishers, c2000

タイトル別名

The failure of criticism

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注記

Originally published: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1978

Includes bibliographical references (p. [175]-196) and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to current opposition to the predominance of radical critical theory in contemporary literature departments. Humanist criticism, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, may well lack authority in the contemporary world. Even amid the disruptions of the industrial revolution, nineteenth-century humanists such as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle could assume a positive order of value and shared habits of imaginative perception and understanding between writers and readers. Eugene Goodheart argues that, by contrast, contemporary criticism is infused with the skepticism of modernist aesthetics. It has willfully rejected the very idea of moral authority.Goodheart starts from the premise that questions about the moral authority of literature and criticism often turn upon a prior question of what happens when the sacred disappears or is subjected to the profane. He focuses on contending spiritual views, in particular the dialectic between the Protestant-inspired, largely English humanist tradition of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and D.H. Lawrence and the decay of Catholicism represented by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Goodheart argues that literary modernism, in distancing itself from natural and social vitality, tends to render suspect all privileged positions. It thereby undermines the critical act, which assumes the priority of a particular set of values. Goodheart makes his case by analyzing the work of a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, nineteenth century and contemporary. He blends literary theory and practical criticism.

目次

  • 1: Modernism and the Critical Spirit
  • 2: English Social Criticism and the Spirit of Reformation
  • 3: The Reality of Disillusion in T. S. Eliot
  • 4: The Organic Society of F. R. Leavis
  • 5: A Postscript to the Higher Criticism
  • 6: The Formalist Avant-Garde and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Values
  • 7: Aristocrats and Jacobins
  • 8: Flaubert and the Powerlessness of Art
  • 9: The Blasphemy of Joycean Art

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詳細情報

  • NII書誌ID(NCID)
    BA49673553
  • ISBN
    • 0765806983
  • LCCN
    99087045
  • 出版国コード
    us
  • タイトル言語コード
    eng
  • 本文言語コード
    eng
  • 出版地
    New Brunswick
  • ページ数/冊数
    xxi, 203 p.
  • 大きさ
    23 cm
  • 分類
  • 件名
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