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

This call to restore a sense of beauty to our culture will serveas a bellwether of the future of literary studies. Beauty and the Critic brings together well-knownmembers of the literary academy to reassert the importance of "aestheticcriticism" and the treatment of literature as art.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 interestedin reducing authors and their works to ideological elements, thereby mostlyignoring 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 evenas the contributors struggle with familiar problems in contemporary criticism,including the problem of the increasing distance between the language ofthe professoriate and the language of the general reader. This collection of essays by its very nature does notpresent a solution to the problem but demonstrates that critics still havemany ways to approach literature that attend to its peculiar idiom andits distinctive achievement. The essays suggest that the profession ofliterature is undergoing a sea change, not necessarily for the better,and that popular models of interpretation have become rote, shopworn conventions--techniquesthat replace thought rather than express it. James Soderholm and his colleaguesinvite us to restore a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity to the studyof literature.