The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture

Giles Gunn's important new work is at once a provocative defense of the kind of moral reflection once associated in America with the writings of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and an acknowledgement that this pragmatic legacy must be reevaluated in the light of challenges posed by structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Including detailed discussions of such thinkers as Kenneth Burke, Clifford Geertz, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Rorty, Trilling, and Wilson, Gunn challenges the assumptions of modern criticism with a revised interpretation of pragmatism and its critical legacy. Part critical analysis, part philosophical argument, part literary and cultural history, this work is a carefully delineated vision of what criticism actively engaged in its society can accomplish. Contents......Page 18 I: Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture......Page 20 1. Introduction......Page 22 2. The Moral Imagination in Modern American Criticism......Page 38 3. The Challenge of the "New New Criticism"......Page 60 4. Pragmatism as Critical Antidote: The Allopathic Medicine of Kenneth Burke......Page 82 II: The Culture of Criticism and the Moral Imagination......Page 110 5. The Semiotics of Culture and the Diagnostics of Criticism: Clifford Geertz and the Moral Imagination......Page 112 6. The Humanities and Their Discontents: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Recovery of Alterity......Page 135 7. American Studies as Cultural Criticism......Page 166 8. Recent Criticism and the Sediments of the Sacred......Page 192 Notes......Page 216 A......Page 228 C......Page 229 E......Page 230 I......Page 231 M......Page 232 P......Page 233 S......Page 234 Z......Page 235 The aim of this book is to challenge the assumptions made by the structuralist and post-structuralist schools of literary criticism. It defends and attempts to re-evaluate the kind of moral reflection associated with the critical legacy of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. Giles Gunn. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 197-207.