‘Whom Do You Serve With This? Teaching the Politics of Post-Modernism
‘Whom Do You Serve With This? Teaching the Politics of Post-Modernism

Summary/Abstract: If Leavis's commitment to romantic individualism, inseparable from his tireless endeavour to ensure the continuity of resistance to the essentially totalitarian, depersonalising values of the technological-Benthamite civilisation and particularly to the growing menace of the American ethos, was a sheer mystification, concealing, as his post-modern critics now claim, his secret collusion with the Establishment, how is one to describe their own literary and cultural theory? What is one to make of the literary and cultural criticism which denies the individual any power to intervene in historical processes, which demonstrates relentlessly the ways culture entraps and expropriates the self, translating the individual into a subject, but marginalises equally tirelessly, almost perversely, the kind of literature whose theme was the reverse process - that of the transformation of the subject back into the individual - and yet declares its purpose to be social and political liberation? Perhaps, instead of defending the humanist critic from too many, often contradictory objections, one should begin to demystify his demystifiers: perhaps, rather than take them at their word, one should begin to ask what or whom they serve behind their confident democratic and revolutionary postures?

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