Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory Edinburgh Scholarship Online

This study reintroduces critique. It begins by defining the difference between criticism and critique, and goes on to propose an ampler, dynamic view of critique as a movement of geographical and intellectual displacements. Against the background of a wide- ranging archive, discussion illuminates the non-linear temporalities and trajectories through which theory operates. Italian Theory, in particular, acts as the fulcrum of a more inclusive and less combative notion of critique. This ‘living thought’ cuts across the translation of European thought into Anglo-American theory and carries with it lingering modernist motifs linked to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. While connecting to the ‘post-critique’ debate, the study focuses on recovering the ethical underpinnings of critique. It demonstrates that before being a specific method or disciplinary practice, critique is a stance including indocility receptiveness, openness to transformation awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality, and wonder. The book is structured around fundamental keywords in the lexicon of literary studies: critic, theory, language, tradition, text, method, and poststructuralism. It argues that literary critical practice is allied 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.