我们从未批判过:以小说为批判

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION Pub Date : 2017-11-01 DOI:10.1215/00295132-4195016
Anna Kornbluh
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引用次数: 23

摘要

现代语言协会主席、高等教育政策专家和威斯康星州州长都欣然同意,我们目前的处境代表着人文学科的危机。对于任何像这篇评估50年马克思主义文学理论的评估文章来说,认同这种共识似乎都是一个强制性的开端。然而,为证明人文学科的合理性而进行的斗争,无论目前多么无效,都不容易分期:正如弗里德里希·尼采和马修·阿诺德已经指出的那样,艺术和思想教育本质上与现代民主资本主义的车轮相冲突。尽管批判性思维和文化差异频繁地被挥舞成世界市场不断扩张的旗帜,但对美与善的隐含价值的美学哲学探究永远无法完全融入剩余价值制度;沉溺于无用永远不能完全融入工具理性的统治;宣告奇异和普遍永远不可能与制度化的多元主义完全一致。在这条漫长的弧线内,当前时刻只能作为2008年金融危机后危机的量化加剧而出现,作为将危机内化为方法创新和冲突的引擎而出现。事实上,学术人文学科的最新趋势——大数据、瘦描述、实证主义历史主义和批判批判——享受着冷静和深入的外表,但所有这些都必须被理解为危机不可避免地带来的灵魂探索和认识投降。当然,这些运动并不是这样看待自己的,但这在很大程度上是因为他们没有看到人文学科为合法性而进行的永久战争(甚至也没有看到这场战争的当代战线)。在这篇文章中,我认为马克思主义的小说理论,嵌入到更广泛的马克思主义危机和美学方法中,继续为小说研究提出紧迫的问题,并继续阐明未来研究文学社会生活矛盾的途径。要论证这种持续的重要性,就需要在被称为“后英国主义”的运动中解决当代对马克思主义文学理论的否定。尽管最近许多文学批评流派已经放弃了马克思主义的美学和政治观点,马克思自己的作品和最优秀的马克思主义文学读者的乌托邦维度仍然是追踪当今文学生产、文学阅读和文学批评独特价值的有希望的弧线。后英国主义最突出的平台是丽塔·费尔斯基的《批判的极限》(2015),它是过去十年方法战和
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We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique
The president of the Modern Language Association, higher education policy wonks, and the governor of Wisconsin all readily agree that our current present represents a crisis for the humanities. Cosigning that consensus would seem an obligatory opening for any stock-taking essay like this one, assessing fifty years of Marxist literary theory. Yet the struggle to justify the humanities, however vitiating at this moment, is not readily periodizable: as Friedrich Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold already argued, education in arts and ideas inherently clashes with the roiling wheels of modern democratic capitalism. Even though critical thinking and cultural difference are so frequently brandished as banners for the unceasing expansion of the world market, aesthetic-philosophical inquiry into the allusive values of the beautiful and the good can never be wholly assimilated to the regime of surplus value; reveling in uselessness can never be wholly incorporated in the reign of instrumental reason; heralding the singular and the universal can never be wholly squared with institutionalized pluralism. Within this long arc, the present moment can only appear new qua the quantitative intensification of the crisis after the 2008 financial meltdown and qua the internalization of crisis into an engine of methodological innovation and strife. Indeed, the very latest trends in the academic humanities—big data, thin description, positivist historicism, and the critique of critique—enjoy the veneer of the cool and roll deep as the funded, but must all be grasped as so much soul-searching and epistemic capitulation inevitably consequent upon crisis. This is of course not how these movements see themselves, but that is in no small part because they do not see the humanities’ permanent war for legitimacy (nor even that war’s contemporary front). In this essay, I argue that Marxist theories of the novel, embedded within broader Marxian approaches to crisis and to the aesthetic, continue to frame urgent questions for the study of the novel and continue to illuminate avenues for future study that confronts contradictions in the social life of literature. Arguing this persistent importance requires tackling the contemporary repudiation of Marxist literary theory in the movement known as “postcritique.” While numerous schools of recent literary criticism have resigned both the aesthetic and the political purviews of Marxism, the utopian dimensions of Marx’s own work and of the finest Marxist literary readers still remain promising arcs for tracing the unique values of literary production, literary reading, and literary critique today. The most prominent platform of postcritique is Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), poised as ex post facto manifesto for the past decade of method wars and
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来源期刊
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期刊介绍: Widely acknowledged as the leading journal in its field, Novel publishes essays concerned with the novel"s role in engaging and shaping the world. To promote critical discourse on the novel, the journal publishes significant work on fiction and related areas of research and theory. Recent issues on the early American novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and postcolonial modernisms carry on Novel"s long-standing interest in the Anglo-American tradition.
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