Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in an Age of Cultural Studies

The contributors are responding to what the editor calls "the banality of partisanship of literary criticism in this country." The common focus is a shared suspicion of critics who are only interested in reducing authors and their works to ideological elements, thereby mostly ignoring what makes their writings distinctive as works of art. This focus, however, by no means represents a curmudgeonly reaction or a united front. Indeed, the collection's strength is precisely its rich diversity even as the contributors struggle with familiar problems in contemporary criticism, including the problem of the increasing distance between the language of the professoriate and the language of the general reader. This collection of essays by its very nature does not present a solution to the problem but demonstrates that critics still have many ways to approach literature that attend to its peculiar idiom and its distinctive achievement. The essays suggest that the profession of literature is undergoing a sea change, not necessarily for the better, and that popular models of interpretation have become rote, shopworn conventions—techniques that replace thought rather than express it. James Soderholm and his colleagues invite us to restore a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity to the study of literature.