One of our most incisive critics asks where the assault against
the canons of Western culture has led us. Engaging a wide range of
literature and criticism, Hartman considers the term "culture" and
its many uses, and calls for the restoration of literature to its
place as the focus of thinking about culture and for the renewal of
aesthetic education to help ensure the balance between art,
culture, and politics.
Lost among the shouts and skirmishes of the "culture wars" is
the very idea of culture itself.
In this illuminating book, one of our most distinguished critics
and scholars asks what the assault against the canons of Western
culture has left in its place. If art and literature are largely
the products of ideology and interest, how do they matter? And what
does the idea of culture mean in today's sprawling, fragmented,
critical world where everything -poetry or pornography- gets "read"
in the same way?
Engaging an extraordinary range of literature, philosophy,
social criticism, and popular culture, Geoffrey Hartman probes the
meanings and uses of culture in contemporary society. The triumph
of cultural studies -and its critiques of bourgeois Eurocentric
tradition- is largely complete, Hartman writes. Against the
political appropriation of culture, he posits, instead, a
definition of culture as public conversation, intellectual and
social debate among diverse communities. And against reactionary
pressures to impose -or reinstate- a singular culture, or to seek
in art or literature an affirmation of group identity, Hartman
sketches new roles for human imagination in a postmodern world.
For Hartman, the fusion of culture and politics, of whatever
ideology, is disastrous. At a time of abstraction, fragmentation,
and alienation, art and literature offer wholeness and meaning. But
the promise is frought with danger, Hartman argues, in a
provocative discussion of the uses of culture as exemplified in the
Romantic legacy. He pays special attention to literature's role in
reconnecting us to the world. The choice is ours: Wordsworth or
Heidegger, literature as shared experience or as reactionary
ideology.
Hartman ranges widely in these elegant pages. He confronts the
shock to the universalistic sense of culture from the Holocaust, as
well as the problematic responses of such critic as Adorno and
Derrida; explores the poetry of Wordsworth both as a diagnostic and
a counter-model to the desensitization of modern life; and
addresses the impact of politics of inclusion and diversity on the
claims of high culture.
Perhaps Hartman's most publicly engaged book, "The Fateful
Question of Culture" embraces both the masterworks of European
literature and art and the signs and symbols of popular media and
daily life. It is a powerful reaffirmation of the liberating
discourses that have always been at the very center of the Western
tradition.
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