The Politics of Literary Theory

Philip Goldstein examines in this study the politics of a potpourri of modern criticism - new critical, authorial, reader-oriented phenomenological, structuralist, and poststructuralist. In the process, he contends that Marxist and feminist criticism divide these critical approaches along political lines, each position, whether theoretical or practical, fractured along conservative, liberal, and radical lines. From the ranks of contemporary Marxists and feminists, Goldstein surveys the literary criticism of Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Tony Bennett, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, Judith Newton and Barbara Johnson. Among the book's distinctive features are Goldstein's examination of the literary import of the complementary relationship between the work of Michel Foucault and that of Louis Althusser, and his exploration of the cultural implications of glasnost and perestroika. Professional criticism, Goldstein points out, no longer occupies a private, neutral realm, but has joined the public, political world.