The Institution Of Literature

Leading voices in literary and cultural studies examine the study of literature at the college level, including the fate of theory, the rise of cultural studies, the academic “star” system, and the difficult job market.

Leading voices in literary and cultural studies examine the study of literature at the college level, including the fate of theory, the rise of cultural studies, the academic “star” system, and the difficult job market.

German radicals of the 1960s announced the death of literature. For them, literature both past and present, as well as conventional discussions of literary issues, had lost its meaning. In The Institution of Criticism, Peter Uwe Hohendahl explores the implications of this crisis from a Marxist perspective and attempts to define the tasks and responsibilities of criticism in advanced capitalist societies. Hohendahl takes a close look at the social history of literary criticism in Germany since the eighteenth century. Drawing on the tradition of the Frankfurt School and on Jürgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere, Hohendahl sheds light on some of the important political and social forces that shape literature and culture. The Institution of Criticism is made up of seven essays originally published in German and a long theoretical introduction written by the author with English-language readers in mind. This book conveys the rich possibilities of the German perspective for those who employ American and French critical techniques and for students of contemporary critical theory.

The contributions investigate the ways in which numerous institutions of English literature shape the literary field. While they cover an extensive historical field, ranging from the Early Modern period to the 18th century to the contemporary, they focus not only on literary texts, but also on extra-literary ones, including literary prizes, literary histories and anthologies, and highlight the various ways in which these negotiate the processes that constitute the literary field. All contributions assert that there is no such thing as literature outside of institutions. Great emphasis is therefore put on different acts of mediation.

Originally published in 1994. In The Institution of Theory, Murray Krieger examines, at once sympathetically and critically, the process by which theory has become institutionalized in the American academy and the consequences of theory as an academic institution. He traces the transformation of literary theory into critical theory and relates it to changes in the place of literature within questions about discourse at large. And he faces the costs as well as the gains of the recent denial of privilege to the literary. To support his view of the issues at stake in current theoretical debates, Krieger surveys both the history of American criticism and the general history of literary theory in the West. He sees divisions in each of them that foreshadow the current debates: in the first a conflict between the social and the aesthetic functions of literature, and in the second a conflict between the treatment of literature as a reflection of a culture's ideology and the treatment of literature as a subversion of that ideology. To what extent, he asks, are our debates new and to what extent are they merely refashioned versions of those we have always had?

By bringing in different degrees of circulation in different regions and languages, this collection shows that while literary centers do exist in what Pascale Casanova calls "the international literary space," their power does not operate unilaterally and modes of intercultural circulation do exist beyond their control. The title World Literature in Motion highlights the fact that world literature is always already the product of certain modes of conceptual and material mobility and mediation.