Criticism and Politics

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and, most recently, The Beneficiary (2017).

"Urgent, bracing, and powerfully argued, Criticism and Politics will be controversial in the best sense—inviting us all to debate the purposes and presumptions of criticism on newly articulated grounds."—Caroline Levine, Cornell University, author of Forms "This is a vivid, engaging, and engaged piece of literary criticism, as well as a vigorous defense of criticism as a method, by one of its foremost practitioners."—Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of Literature for a Changing Planet "For those who have been looking for a book to address, head on, the complex connections between literary criticism and politics, this is that book."—Mark Greif, Stanford University, author of Against Everything "This challenging, bold book helps answer the question of what critics are for. Highly recommended"—S. J. Shaw, CHOICE "There's much combined intellectual-governance work to do in criticism's pursuit of power within current systems of knowledge. The importance of Robbins's book is to show that this work is part of criticism's past—while also insisting that it must be central to its future."—Christopher Newfield, Los Angeles Review of Books "[Robbins's] erudite discussion of different literary theorists and cultural critics (from Matthew Arnold to Judith Butler) makes the book an introduction of a unique kind: it is a history of criticism very unlike the ones that merely summarize arguments about different modes of reading texts as made by the theorists from the angle of political standpoints. It is polemical in the sense that it does not shy away from taking sides with critics or positions, even demonstrating intelligent ways of reading them that show tremendous courage in raising difficult questions of literature and criticism, not subscribing to the idea that criticism-as-fault-finding is a less than noble activity."—Soni Wadhwa, South Atlantic Review

• Introduction1. Criticism in the Wake of the 1960s2. Criticizing3. Lost Centrality4. Aesthetics and the Governing of Others5. Grievances6. The Historical and the Transhistorical7. Cosmopolitical Criticism in Deep TimeConclusion