Critical Situation

Robert T. Tally is Professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (2022), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Realizing History through Fantasy (2022) and Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019).

“Robert T. Tally Jr’s new book contains important critical essays engaging with the major developments in ‘postmodern literary studies,’ with a visionary conclusion ‘An Anagogic Education.’ Tally proposes here how a Frye and Jameson can work together. Among recent books, there is no rival to Tally’s, in terms of wide coverage, in-depth analysis, and imaginative lucidity. To those new in the field and jaded veterans alike, I highly recommend The Critical Situation”— Daniel T. O’Hara, Professor of English and Inaugural Mellon, Professor of Humanities, Temple University.

• Introduction: The Situation of Criticism; Part I Critical Positioning Systems, 1. Swerve, Trope, Peripety: Turning Points in Cultural Criticism and Theory; 2. The Aesthetics of Distance: Space, Weltliteratur, and Critique; 3. World Literature and Its Discontents; 4. Worlding Space: Spatial Literary Studies and the Planetary Turn; 5. In the File Drawer Labeled “Science Fiction”: Genre after the Age of the Novel; Part II Post-Americanist Interpolations, 6. “Believing in America”: The Ideology of American Studies; 7. “Some men ride on such space”: Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, the Melville Revival, and the American Baroque; 8. The Southern Phoenix Triumphant: The Consequences of Richard Weaver’s Ideas; 9. Bleeping Mark Twain?: Censorship, Huckleberry Finn, and the Functions of Literature; 10. I Am the Mainstream Media (and So Can You!): The Hyperreality of “Fake News”; Part III Errant Trajectories in Postmodern Critical Practice, 11. Nomadography: Gilles Deleuze and the History of Philosophy; 12. Power to the Educated Imagination!: Northrop Frye and the Utopian Impulse; 13. Edward Said and Marxism: Wars of Position in Oppositional Criticism; 14. An American Bakhtin: Jonathan Arac, or, the Vocation of the Critic; 15. Bathsheba’s Stomach: Poiesis and Criticism in Paul A. Bové’s Love’s Shadow; Conclusion: An Anagogical Education; Acknowledgments; Index