Joseph North, _Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History_, part two

WHAT THE DOMINANT historicist/contextualist paradigm needs to make it more truly political, North argues, is to incorporate more criticism; doing that, he claims, would involve a greater engagement with aesthetics.

Surprising, no? At first blush, it looks like North wants a rewind to the 1950s.

Not really, though. As an academic discourse, North writes, criticism was "defined precisely by the strength and directness of its connection to the world outside the academy" (5). He associates it with "public intellectuals." He does not provide much in the way of specific examples, unfortunately, but I am guessing he means  figures who wrote about literature (a) for non-specialist audiences and (b) with a view towards changing how people thought and what people did about questions of the day: Coleridge and T. S. Eliot from the right, say, Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling from the center, George Orwell and Dwight MacDonald from the left. (For contemporary figures, maybe Rebecca Solnit? Mark Greif?)

Neither does he means by "aesthetics" what one might immediately assumes he means. The historicist/contextualist paradigm has been pretty rough on aesthetics, seeing it (following Bourdieu and Raymond Williams) as a covertly ideological instrument. North does not disagree, but he sees that critique as really addressing only the  "idealist" aesthetics derived from Kant that saw art as disinterested, autotelic, transcendent, and such. The aesthetics he would champion would be a "materialist" aesthetics, part of an "aesthetic education."

Here, too, some specific examples would have been welcome. I kept thinking he was going  to bring up Schiller on the topic of aesthetic education, or Jacques Rancière as an example of materialist aesthetic thought, but no. The focus is strictly Anglo-American throughout, unfortunately. For my money, Rancière is exactly what North seems to be hoping for. But that's just my guess.

I think North is right that the discipline is looking for ways to step out of the historicist/contextualist paradigm--his longest chapter is full of examples of scholars pushing the envelope a bit (I certainly concur in his high opinion of D. A. Miller's book on Austen)--but, true to his premise, he does not expect the paradigm to shift until the neoliberal order cracks up (192-93). So, the paradigm may be with us for a while.