Criticism as Politics: The Way(s) to History

286 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985.The following study examines some of the central theoretical issues in contemporary criticism by focusing on the implicit and explicit political claims made in critical discourses.The introductory chapter provides the background to contemporary theoretical concerns in the ambivalent relationship between recent criticism and its Enlightenment inheritance. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the works of Paul de Man and Mikhail Bakhtin, drawing out the general implications of a theory of language for interpretive issues and problems. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the works of Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser, and examine the relationships between textuality, ideology, power and history. The last chapter institutes a dialogue between the opposed traditions of hermeneutics and deconstruction in order to adequately formulate the underlying issues as they have developed in the discussions in the previous chapters.The central argument of the study, developed cumulatively and in close contact with the individual words examined, is that contemporary theory's claims to a significant politics are best understood in its essential desire to interrogate its own limits as well as the limits of discourse in general. This desire needs to be formulated if further study is to be more directly concerned with the institutional and political contexts of the discursive.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD