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Stubborn Against the Fact: Literary Ideals, Philosophy and Criticism

出版	University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, John U. Nef Commitee on Social Thought, 2011
ISBN	11247176179781124717616
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=KmxJAQAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋In my dissertation, 'Literature, Criticism and the Binary of Modernity, ' I analyze how Ezra Pound, Charles Olson and new historicist literary critics have both embodied and tried to overcome the 'modern binary, ' a concept I take from Hegelian social theory. These philosophers argue that modernity can be described as split between an urge for independence and freedom, and the continuing fact of dependence on social structures; this split leads to a deracinated and unfree form of subjectivity. The writers I consider hold on to the ideal that this independence and dependence can be overcome in a new form of subjectivity, and I argue that literature has great value as a vehicle for reflection on such ideals. Pound and Olson tried to create a new form of subjectivity; perhaps unsurprisingly, they could not complete their projects. But their works succeed as literature, and we can learn from both their successes and their failures. Both authors show the need to think through our ideals and indict a society that gives rise to utopian desires but frustrates attempts at progress. Accordingly, I argue that literary criticism should be equally as concerned with literary ideals as it is with projects of subversion. To explain how skeptical literary criticism can obscure literary idealism, I analyze new historicist readings of Chaucer's Knight's Tale. I focus on an unambiguously premodern text to show the difficulty of thinking outside the binary. Because these critics take the binary as a transhistorical background to their readings, they foreclose the possibility of a reconciled world.