Conflict and Consensus in the History of Recent Criticism

[ THINK FEW would quarrel with the assertion that since the decline of the New Criticism, literary criticism has become progressively more concerned with the description, interpretation, and explanation of literary works and progressively more suspicious of value judgments about them. One of the curious effects of this change has been to make the history of recent criticism very different from what appears in either critical theory or critical practice. For surely a discussion of this history would have to deal with what seem like fundamental changes in values: for example, the inclusion of popular culture, ethnic literature, Third World literature, women's literature, film, the teaching of reading, and the teaching of English as a second language within English departments and within literary study. It would deal with what sound like important value conflicts: between a concentration on selected texts and an evenhanded concern for the

Criticism · Epistemology · Political science · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• Compromising Positions

  Open Access•Richard Boyd•Communication Theory•1999

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