The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

subsequently become known as the
sociology of knowledge. Weber and
Durkheim are also central figures in the
transformation. Although the three writers
do not necessarily agree about what
the relevant social context is for explaining
why we think as we do, they do share
a sense that it is in some concept of social
structure that an explanation is to be
found.
Literary criticism has developed
various affiliations with the different
modes of critique. An early equivalent for
the Kantian critique can be found in
ROMANTIC theories of IMAGINATION which
attempt to locate the origins of literature
in a faculty which is ambiguously placed
between a human and a divine mind.
Since then, the different modalities of
critique – Marxism, feminism, linguistics,
structuralism, psychoanalysis – have all,
in combination or separately, produced
critical theory which is concerned not
only with the detailed analysis and evaluation
of literary works but also with their
conditions of existence, whether these are
discovered in the structures of culture or
language, in the laws of narrative, or the
ideologies produced by class-divided
societies. It is possible, therefore, to distinguish
between those forms of literary
criticism which bear some affiliation to
critique and those which do not concern
themselves with reflexive thought, preferring
instead to carry out routine maintenance
of a literary canon whose own
creation is not subject to inquiry. But
there are other and equally important
kinds of distinction to be made, notably
between those kinds of critique and
criticism which put in question forms of
political power, and those which locate
the fundamental questions outside the
realm of politics, in certain (claimed)
invariant properties of culture, language
or the human unconscious. Critique
Cultural criticism 41
reproduces today a division – and a point
of transgression – which characterized
its eighteenth-century origins. As Paul
Connerton has noted (Introduction to
Critical Sociology, 1976), in the eighteenth
century ‘The process of critique
claimed to subject to its judgement all
spheres of life which were accessible to
reason; but it renounced any attempt to
touch on the political sphere.’ But this
self-denying ordinance was not maintained
for long. Critique increasingly
concerned itself with politics and laid the
intellectual foundations for the French
Revolution. Then, as now, when critique,
and the forms of literary criticism associated
with it, question the prevailing distribution
of political power, the alarm bells
start to ring. By contrast, the apolitical
forms of critique are a tolerated part of the
intellectual scene. But this distinction
between the political and the apolitical is
not itself invariable and we cannot necessarily
know in advance what form of critique
will strike a political nerve. See also
DECONSTRUCTION, DISCOURSE, FEMINIST
CRITICISM, MARXIST CRITICISM, PSYCHOLOGY
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS and references.
Some examples of work which, in
various ways, presupposes critique as a
goal, would include C. Belsey, Critical
Practice (1980); T. Eagleton, Criticism
and Ideology (1976); A. Easthope, Poetry
as Discourse (1983); R. Fowler, Literature
as Social Discourse (1981), Linguistic
Criticism (1986); P. Widdowson (ed.),
Re-Reading English (1982); Deborah
Cameron (ed.), The Feminist Critique of
Language: A Reader (1998).
Cultural criticism This term is an
extremely broad and generally unhelpful
appellation given to an amorphous body
of critical practices that explore the
functioning of culture not purely in its
JC