Token professionals and master critics : a critique of orthodoxy in literary studies
This book addresses literary critics in mainstream institutions who, though they vastly outnumber their colleagues in more prestigious institutions, have little voice in the profession. It examines the structures through which the institution of literary critical pressures its members to accept orthodoxy/heterodoxy as categories to describe their work, which in turn provokes theory wars. This opposition produces a method/application dichotomy that renders members' pursuits scientistic
Print Book, English, ©1994
State University of New York Press, Albany, ©1994
xxxiii, 272 pages ; 24 cm
9780791418093, 9780791418109, 079141809X, 0791418103
27935503
1. Token Professionals and Professorial Templates
2. Canonical Critics
3. Homo Criticus Americanus
4. The Kritikroman
5. The CV as Personal History
6. The Magister Implicatus: A Configuration of Orthodoxy
7. The Compulsion to be Orthodox
8. When Bonds Become Binds
9. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a Counterallegory of Orthodoxy
10. The Hyde Effect
11. The Resentment of Theory
12. Theories Need Not Be Methods
13. Theoretical Lore
14. Error as Heuristic
15. Critical Registers
16. Who Benefits by Literary Study?
17. Rhetoric and Suffering
18. The Way in Is the Way Out