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Situational tensions of intellectual-critics: Thinking through literary politics with Edward Said and Frank Lentricchia
Abstract
Drawing on the critical social theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jurgen Habermas, I take a close look at the "oppositional criticism" of Said and Lentricchia and attempt to illuminate the unlit places there, which I refer to as "situational tensions." My discussion of Said's and Lentricchia's situational tensions is made in terms of their self-image, theoretical affiliation, and their strategy of totalizing about their life-world. I argue that Said's and Lentricchia's adoption of the "intellectual" as their self-image is their way of recognizing a certain type of subject as the precondition for basic change. Based on this recognition, their affiliating with Marxism or Foucault results in an emphasis on producing a cultural counterdiscourse of intellect emancipation. However, literary critics must come to an understanding of the systemic impediments to their emancipatory projects. Said and Lentricchia, constrained by the pressure to avoid conceptions of social totality and human totality, have failed to give full articulation to a much needed moral philosophy, even though they both show a keen interest in the ethical. Their theoretical hesitance has blunted the humanist edge of the "intellectual," which is the central figure in their "oppositional criticism." The demise of the intellectual-critic reflects the fundamental antinomy of today's intellectual work itself: it cannot be done if it is isolated from praxis, from involvement in political movement or political action; but neither can it be done well if it is isolated from the pressures of competing intellectual ideas in the current stream of intellectual debate which is located in the university. To recognize this intellectual antinomy, however, is not just to ratify what has been and must be. What begins with Said's and Lentricchia's need for a changed concept of the "intellectual" and for literary politics may lead finally to the intellectual's need for a changed world, and a search for proper strategies in order to play a more active part in the process of change.
Subject Area
American literature|Sociology|Political science
Recommended Citation
Xu, Ben, "Situational tensions of intellectual-critics: Thinking through literary politics with Edward Said and Frank Lentricchia" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9207477.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9207477