{"id":7917,"date":"2010-02-02T22:22:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T02:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=7917"},"modified":"2010-02-02T22:22:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T02:22:55","slug":"criticism-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/02\/02\/criticism-and-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Criticism and Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"x5906\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While looking for a quotation in David Lodge\u2019s 1990 book After Bakhtin<\/em>, I rediscovered his review of Imre Salusinszky\u2019s Criticism in Society<\/a><\/em>, which is reprinted as the last essay in After Bakhtin<\/em>.\u00a0 Criticism and Society<\/em> is a collection of interviews with Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, and a group of influential critics at American universities, recorded by Salusinszky in the mid-1980s, at the moment when deconstruction was beginning to give way to schools of criticism more concerned with ideology and social identity.\u00a0 Some readers of this blog will know Imre Salusinszky\u2019s work on Frye; he left academe some time ago to work for the newspaper The Australian<\/a><\/em> and is now a well-known political and cultural commentator in Australia.<\/p>\n

Criticism in Society<\/em> came out the year that I defended my PhD, and I remember that it was read avidly by everyone with an interest in literary theory.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure most readers were like myself in not fully taking in the prominent position that Frye was given in the book: we were mostly too interested in what the stars of Yale, Columbia, and Duke had to say.\u00a0 Lodge sums up Salusinszky\u2019s premise in his own words as follows: \u201csince literary criticism was virtually monopolized by the universities, it has become of all-absorbing interest to its practitioners and a matter of indifference or incomprehension to society at large.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lodge\u2019s review is particularly resonant at the moment, as the humanities in the university seem to be returning to the same austerity conditions that prevailed during the 1980s.\u00a0 He observes that among the critics interviewed, \u201conly Frye and Derrida . . . mention the problem of obtaining public funds for the humanities.\u00a0 If Mr Salusinszky had interviewed a batch of British academic critics at the same time he would have heard about little else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lodge quotes Frank Lentricchia defending socially engaged criticism from an attack by Harold Bloom, then observes:<\/p>\n

But there is a certain factitiousness about the counter-attack, betrayed by the familiar \u2018Harold\u2019.\u00a0 Nearly all the interviewers refer to each other, even when expressing strong disagreement, by first names \u2013 Harold, Geoffrey, Jacques, etc. (though not \u2018Northrop\u2019 \u2013 in this as in other respects, Frye is the odd man out.\u00a0 I wonder if anyone dares to call him Northrop).\u00a0 This style of naming again reminds one of the world of sport, where top athletes who compete fiercely against each other on the football field or tennis court share a kind of professional camaraderie at other times, a mutual respect based on their sense of belonging to a professional \u00e9lite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder, however, whether criticism or theory has such an absorbing interest even for aspiring practitioners today?\u00a0 Are there nine critics today whose words in interview would be eagerly perused \u2013 and if not, is that a good or a bad thing?\u00a0 Has the pendulum swung back to interest in the creative writer?\u00a0 Perhaps we would rather read interviews with \u2013 to pick a few names randomly \u2013 Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Nino Ricci, Martin Amis, or Lorrie Moore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While looking for a quotation in David Lodge\u2019s 1990 book After Bakhtin, I rediscovered his review of Imre Salusinszky\u2019s Criticism in Society, which is reprinted as the last essay in After Bakhtin.\u00a0 Criticism and Society is a collection of interviews with Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, and a group of influential critics at American universities, recorded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[50,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-frye-contemporary-criticism","category-society"],"yoast_head":"\nCriticism and Society - 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