The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture

by Giles Gunn

Giles Gunn's challenging new work is at once a passionately argued defense of the kind of moral reflection once associated in America with the writings of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and an acknowledgment that this pragmatic legacy must be reevaluated in the light of challenges posed by
structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Gunn's perceptive analysis, which includes lengthy discussions of such thinkers as Kenneth Burke, Clifford Geertz, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Rorty, Trilling, and Wilson, challenges the assumptions of modern criticism with a revised interpretation of
pragmatism and its critical legacy. Part critical analysis, part philosophical argument, part literary and cultural history, this work is a carefully delineated vision of what criticism actively engaged in its society can accomplish.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 1987