KRETNJE I POKRETI ŽIVOTA KNJIŽEVNE I KULTURNE KRITIKE
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS IN THE LIFE OF LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Summary/Abstract: The word critique originates from Ancient Greek, meaning the act of assessment and the skill of discernment. It, just like the word criterion, is derived from Ancient Greek word krino. The genre of writing called critique first emerged in the later stages of the 17th century. Its growth, development, and expansion occurred during the 18th century and beyond. Critique became, so to speak, an equal partner to literature in the 19th century. A professional literary critique emerged through university education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was followed by the institutionalization of literary criticism and its development as a scientific discipline and discourse, branching within the study of literature and extending beyond it, accompanied by its highs and lows. Oscar Wilde says that the Greeks bestowed the entire system of art criticism and their refined critical instinct upon us. He adds that this is not at all coincidentally linked to the material they most meticulously criticized, which is language (1117). In that vein, Harold Bloom states that he sees no difference, neither in class nor in degree, between the language of poetry and the language of critique (16). Roland Barthes expresses the same opinion about the language of poetry and the language of critique (40). Therefore, one of the initial axioms of critique is that it is a kind of prose that can be considered or is actually considered a sort of artistic prose. Bloom and Barthes both not only abolish hierarchy but also annul the rigid polarization between the writer and the critic, as well as such a dichotomy between the language of artistic and critical texts. A literary critique, therefore, and based on all its other postulates, is a peculiarly democratic type of artistic text, just as a literary text is. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that in the writing of critique—because it is, above all and originally, a written form—and especially in the writing of academic critique, there are established rules and norms, but even within those given frameworks and in accordance with them, there is freedom for the author's own stylistic figuration and configuration. Otherwise, each and every critique, especially the academic one, would be uniform, rigid, and lifeless. A critical reading is not a mere reading of a text. Such reading entails expert reception and qualitative assessment of literary text, its careful analytical reading and meaningful interpretation, with a comprehensive aim to establish a dialogue with the literary text as objective and sincere as possible, as well as impartial observation and competent understanding of its communicative effects. Accordingly, the basic tenets and value principles of literary critique and criticism remain unchanged despite all changes in the development and modifications in the forms and modes of a critical expression over time. Particularly in a contemporary, open, meaningful, and free critical thinking, questioning, reassessment, and contemplation of a literary text and, relatedly, a general extraliterary reality, new movements of literary and cultural critique and criticism emerge both in terms of approaching literary text and in the sense of its interpretation, as well as in the overall manifestation of literary and cultural critique and criticism.The traditionally established, conventional, and one-dimensional approaches and methods of reading literary texts, more precisely, the external approach and such positivist method, and the internal approach and such immanent method, are surpassed and unified in contemporaneity precisely due to the dialectical and pluralistic nature of contemporaneity itself, its constituents, and phenomena. The same applies to extrinsic criticism, which focuses on the context of the literary work, and to intrinsic criticism, which focuses on the formal aspects of the literary work. Among other things, the literary text always articulates and archives contemporaneity in its characteristic way, just as literary and cultural critique does in its dialogue with the literary text. Since individuals, phenomena of reality, and texts are interconnected, and since all of this, individually as well as in mutual connection and interrelation, develops from transnational connections, Rita Felski states that a literary critique “is no longer a matter of looking only at texts; or of explaining those texts by invoking the box of historical-political context; but of tracing hybrid and heterogeneous constellations of texts, persons, and things” (762). In that way and in that domain, such transnational and multidimensional approaches and methods of critique, its thought and theory, especially in their relation to previous but also parallel conventions of traditional national critical onedimensionality, which truly and completely are not surpassed, are labeled as postcritique or, actually, as part of postcritique and its possible comparative theorization, which either is based on relational thinking of contemporary disciplines with “comparative” in their title or is connected to it (Anker and Felski). Within the framework of relational thinking and its accompanying application and elaboration in literary theory, the term Worlding has been expanded into a critical paradigm and theoretical approach to addressing the multiple interweavings and modes of joint action of individuals, texts, things/phenomena, with a constant shifting of the center. This term originates from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (59-62). In a sense of postcritique, Worlding is a contemporary literary and interdisciplinary approach that uses an extensive frame of reference in which the nation/state is just one point on the spatial scale, along with the region, hemisphere, climatic area, trade zone, etc. In contrast to critical approaches of, for example, poststructuralism, new historicism, and feminism, which specific critical practices and principles are aimed at discovering and resolving a certain subversive message hidden in the text, the postcritique critics find and advocate a new standpoint, a new approach, a new way, and a new mode of (new) literary reading in accordance with a relational ontology, as Rita Felski calls it (747). Such ontology spreads to the study of the network of texts and connections between them in tandem with human and non-human action through the past, present, and with stepping into the future. This means that postcritique, besides unifying the intrinsic and extrinsic, and applying both the internal and external approach, or in other words, besides analyzing and interpreting the literary text both as a separate entity and in its connection to the context, including the identity, life, and work/opus of the author(s), and thus relatedly the literary field of a certain national literature or more of them, also transcends and surpasses the traditionally anchored, canonical, and one-dimensional framework of the national domain. It does so through a transnational view and understanding of both the entity and identity of the literary text and its author(s), as well as the connection of all that mutually and also with the (extra)literary context. Additionally, the transnational (in)sight of (post)critique—its observation, analysis, and interpretation—implies an equal national and supranational reading of literature across space and time. Accordingly, a literary postcritique, besides a transnational approach, also implies a transdisciplinary approach. Moreover, and relatedly, the movements, trends, and manifestations of a literary postcritique, or at least a part thereof, advocate primarily for a critical return to its literary orientation and focus, or a new reversion to the original literary determination of literary critique, as opposed to, for example, solely theoretical preoccupations, due to which such academic and scientific critique has particularly lost its focus on what makes a literary text literary and what makes literary critique literary, thus causing this type of literary critique to become distinctly separate and isolated in narrow academic towers from nonacademic and broader readership. In any case, the movements and actions of literary and cultural critique in contemporaneity certainly occur with a renewed dedication to the readerly pleasure of reading both literary text(s) in focus and the critical text itself, and necessarily with a new dedication to articulating and rearticulating dialogicity with the societal environment. This paper, dealing with the topic “Movements and trends in the life of literary and cultural criticism,” addresses all of the above, as well as the challenges and risks of contemporary literary and cultural critique and criticism.

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