The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies

by Robert T. Tally Jr

Overview

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a selection of essays that register the situatedness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. This book offers examples of situated criticism, which in turn are concerned with the ways in which literary and cultural criticism are and have been situated in relation to a variety of ideological and institutional structures, including those of world literature, American studies, spatial literary studies, cultural critique, globalization and postmodernity. These structures influence the ways that criticism is practiced, and due recognition of their continuing effects is crucial to the success of any meaningful critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839988332
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Series:	Anthem symploke Studies in Theory , #1
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Robert T. Tally is Professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (2022), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Realizing History through Fantasy (2022) and Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Situation of Criticism; Part I Critical Positioning Systems, 1. Swerve, Trope, Peripety: Turning Points in Cultural Criticism and Theory; 2. The Aesthetics of Distance: Space, Weltliteratur, and Critique; 3. World Literature and Its Discontents; 4. Worlding Space: Spatial Literary Studies and the Planetary Turn; 5. In the File Drawer Labeled “Science Fiction”: Genre after the Age of the Novel; Part II Post-Americanist Interpolations, 6. “Believing in America”: The Ideology of American Studies; 7. “Some men ride on such space”: Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, the Melville Revival, and the American Baroque; 8. The Southern Phoenix Triumphant: The Consequences of Richard Weaver’s Ideas; 9. Bleeping Mark Twain?: Censorship, Huckleberry Finn, and the Functions of Literature; 10. I Am the Mainstream Media (and So Can You!): The Hyperreality of “Fake News”; Part III Errant Trajectories in Postmodern Critical Practice, 11. Nomadography: Gilles Deleuze and the History of Philosophy; 12. Power to the Educated Imagination!: Northrop Frye and the Utopian Impulse; 13. Edward Said and Marxism: Wars of Position in Oppositional Criticism; 14. An American Bakhtin: Jonathan Arac, or, the Vocation of the Critic; 15. Bathsheba’s Stomach: Poiesis and Criticism in Paul A. Bové’s Love’s Shadow; Conclusion: An Anagogical Education; Acknowledgments; Index

Editorial Reviews

Robert T. Tally Jr’s new book contains important critical essays engaging with the major developments in ‘postmodern literary studies,’ with a visionary conclusion ‘An Anagogic Education.’ Tally proposes here how a Frye and Jameson can work together. Among recent books, there is no rival to Tally’s, in terms of wide coverage, in-depth analysis, and imaginative lucidity. To those new in the field and jaded veterans alike, I highly recommend The Critical Situation”— Daniel T. O’Hara, Professor of English and Inaugural Mellon, Professor of Humanities, Temple University.

“The Critical Situation could be titled ‘Prolegomena to a Critical Education.’ Under a bold initial reference to Sartre, it demonstrates how being aware of the situatedness of our readings liberates our subjectivity to embrace the long-term perspective of a radical, cosmopolitan humanism, unbound from the vagaries of one’s ‘national’ culture”— Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Bordeaux Montaigne University.

“Taking vexation seriously as a generative mood for critique, this study offers probing and imaginative forays into our unsettled postmodern situation. In the face of the university’s depoliticization and commodification, Robert T. Tally Jr. reclaims literary criticism’s purchase on the world and its vocation to transform it” —Nicole Simek, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College.

Robert T. Tally, Jr.’s 2023 book The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies, a collection of previously published essays, offers a remarkably coherent picture of post-Americanist critical agency with theoretical sophistication, political savvy, and humanist good humor. Tally characteristically brings together erudition, thoughtfulness, political wisdom, and clear writing, making him an excellent critic for our present time. — Journal of Modern Literature

In a humanities literature increasingly flooded with (self-)advertisements about their applied uses, and when it is becoming impossible to distinguish ‘academic positioning systems’ from the worst forms of marketing-speak, The Critical Situation reminds us of a discipline that, yes, has its micropractices, but has probably made its more lasting contributions to the difficult labour of truth through an insistent macro-synthesis of criticism, history, and theory. —The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

From the Publisher