توضیحات
Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida by Mark Edmundson challenges theory’s critique of literary art. Literature against Philosophy argues that the institutionalization of theory, particularly in North American universities over the past quarter-century, has led to a pervasive intellectual sterility. Theory’s institutional triumph induces critics to offer categorical explanations and demystifying analyses that ignore the actual power of literature. Mark Edmundson traces this tendency to systematize and sterilize literature to Plato’s famous quarrel on behalf of philosophy against the poets. Edmundson goes on to show how contemporary theorists like Foucault, de Man, Derrida, and Bloom have renewed the philosophical drive to demean poetic art, or to subsume it into some `higher’ form of thought.
This is not an anti-theoretical book; it acknowledges the value of theory and the intellectual prowess of the theorists it treats. But the book is also concerned to recognize theory’s limits and to establish the responsibility of literary critics to do more than just theorize: to identify those points where literature resists being explained away. This book comes to the defence of poetry — and of literary art overall — at a time when its cultural status is in doubt. Challenging, clear, and controversial, Mark Edmundson’s work should be read by all teachers of literature and theory, and by anyone concerned with the future of literary studies.
“By focusing on the condescension with which philosophy has, since Plato, treated poetry, Edmundson has given us a remarkably successful and genuinely original treatment of the relation between contemporary European philosophy and American literary criticism. Though he writes in a spirit of reconciliation, his view is bound to be controversial, Many literary theorists have no wish to be reconciled with poets.” RICHARD RORTY
The cover illustration, from William Blake‘s Jerusalem, depicts Los, the spirit of poetic imagination, answering back to the Covering Cherub, Blake’s image for conformity and sterile reason. Photograph supplied by the Rare Books Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Cover design: QuintonWong
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