Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory

This book reintroduces critique. It begins with the difference between criticism and critique and goes on to propose an ampler view of critique as a movement of geographical and intellectual displacements. Against the background of a wide ranging archive, lingering modernist, feminist and psychoanalytic motifs illuminate uneven theoretical temporalities and occluded, eccentric lines of reflection. Structured around keywords, such as critic, theory, language, tradition, text, method, poststructuralism, this inquiry offers a narrative of literary critical practice in its alliance with the movement of thought outside cruel dynamics of humanization (the struggle for recognition, the gaze of the other), and reflects on the role of reading in the important task of imagining others.