Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature
and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth
century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost
center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to current opposition to
the predominance of radical critical theory in contemporary
literature departments. Humanist criticism, which has as its object
the quality of life as well as works of art, may well lack
authority in the contemporary world. Even amid the disruptions of
the industrial revolution, nineteenth-century humanists such as
Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle could assume a
positive order of value and shared habits of imaginative perception
and understanding between writers and readers. Eugene Goodheart
argues that, by contrast, contemporary criticism is infused with
the skepticism of modernist aesthetics. It has willfully rejected
the very idea of moral authority.
Goodheart starts from the premise that questions about the
moral authority of literature and criticism often turn upon a prior
question of what happens when the sacred disappears or is subjected
to the profane. He focuses on contending spiritual views, in
particular the dialectic between the Protestant-inspired, largely
English humanist tradition of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and D.H.
Lawrence and the decay of Catholicism represented by James Joyce
and T.S. Eliot. Goodheart argues that literary modernism, in
distancing itself from natural and social vitality, tends to render
suspect all privileged positions. It thereby undermines the
critical act, which assumes the priority of a particular set of
values. Goodheart makes his case by analyzing the work of a variety
of novelists, poets, and critics, nineteenth century and
contemporary. He blends literary theory and practical
criticism.
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