Criticism and Politics

In the Culture Wars of the 1990s and again over the past few years, the charge has arisen that criticism has become politicized, and that this is a bad thing—a violation of the fundamental nature of criticism’s object, whether that object is seen as literature, aesthetics, or culture. This course will examine fundamental conceptualizations of criticism, the object of criticism, and the goal of criticism as well as conceptualizations of politics, which is at least as confusing and indeed potentially misleading a concept.

If politics is defined in relation to the nation-state, for example, in what ways is political criticism thrown into question in the era of globalization, when politics (like the politics of climate change) arguably spills over the boundaries of the nation-state? Is there a "cosmo-politics," and if so what about the particular brand or brands of criticism thereof?  What was and is the politics assumed by the still relatively recent sub-field of "post-colonial studies," and to what extent is it compatible with its emergent competitor, "world literature"?  What roles has criticism played, and what role should it play, in relation to so-called "identity politics"? What was and is "critique," what relation does it have to politics, and what is the political meaning of so-called "postcritique"?

The course will undertake to study some of the most important past stages of intersection between criticism and politics, including classical rhetoric and the art of governing (Aristotle) and the overlap and tensions between Romantic imagination and the theory of democracy, as in Raymond Williams's classic Culture and Society (1958), as well as contemporary instances and controversies. It will be structured around the Table of Contents of my Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford UP, 2022). Two weeks each will be devoted to:

Chapter 1: the impact on criticism of the 1960s movements

Chapter 2: the concepts of criticism and critique, including “faultfinding” (politics as purely negative critique) and Matthew Arnold’s concept of culture

Chapter 3: the social mission of criticism, the argument that it has lost its sense of vocation, the concept of the organic intellectual (Gramsci, Edward Said, Stuart Hall)

Chapter 4: the relations between aesthetics (in Kant) and governing, with special reference to Foucault

Chapter 5: criticism as a claim to victimhood: a violation of criticism&rs