The Arts and Sciences of Criticism

by Fuller, David; Waugh, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780198186397
• ISBN10: 0198186398
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-08-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This collection reflects on developments in criticism which bear on a debate between different modes of knowledge: a science model and its place in the university versus other ways of conceiving knowledge for which the arts have traditionally been seen as vehicles. Discussion ranges widelywith contributions from outside the literary academy, including essays by the novelists Doris Lessing and David Lodge. All the essays are concerned with what literature, and therefore criticism, is or aims to be. Several are concerned with a specifically aesthetic way of knowing, the value of whichlies in its very resistance to scientific models of knowledge. The answers about how literature can resist such models, and what kinds of knowing best respond to the distinctive nature of aesthetic experience, are varied. The collection also addresses the consequences for literary criticism of thepolitically-driven critique which has recently undermined traditional concepts of truth and knowledge in both arts and sciences. And finally it asks whether professional criticism should be a deepened extension of the sense-making activity of ordinary intelligent reading, or whether it should be apurely objective study, analogous to other scientific forms of knowledge studied in an academic context.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(33)
David Fuller
Patricia Waugh
PART I: CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value	33	(27)
Patricia Waugh
Science, Interpretation, and Criticism	60	(11)
David E. Cooper
Evidence-Based and Evidence-Free Generalizations: A Tale of Two Cultures	71	(23)
Raymond Tallis
Science and the Self: Lacan's Doctrine of the Signifier	94	(23)
Jacques Berthoud
PART II: CRITICISM AND THE AESTHETIC
Poetry as Literary Criticism	117	(20)
Michael O'Neill
Literary Criticism and Literary Creation	137	(16)
David Lodge
Writing Autobiography	153	(11)
Doris Lessing
Beneath Interpretation: Intention and the Experience of Literature	164	(16)
Paul H. Fry
Poetry, Music, and the Sacred	180	(19)
David Fuller
PART III: CRITICISM AND THE ETHICAL
The Aesthetic, the Cognitive, and the Ethical: Criticism and Discursive Responsibility	199	(18)
Sean Burke
Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University	217	(21)
Timothy Clark
The Metaphysics of Modernism: Aesthetic Myth and the Myth of the Aesthetic	238	(19)
Michael Bell
Notes on Contributors	257	(4)
Index	261