No single concept has had a more vital, complex and uncertain relation to literary criticism than ethics. While criticism has long been felt to represent in part an ethical enterprise, the origin and nature of the ethical obligation binding criticism has been a matter of great uncertainty. In part, this uncertainty reflects at a distance a parallel uncertainty concerning the relation of literature to ethics; in part, it is a feature of the practice of criticism or scholarship in any field; and in part it derives from the discourse of ethics itself.

While there are many different strands of ethical thinking, including those grounded in the thought of Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and others, a few very general statements can apply to all. Ethics is a way of putting things in which a given concept or term is set in relation to another concept or term in such a way that each exerts pressure on the other. In ethical discourse, ‘inclination’ might be set against ‘duty’, ‘self-interest’ against ‘altruism’, ‘law’ against ‘custom’, ‘long-term interests’ against ‘shortterm desires’, ‘facts’ against ‘values’; such oppositions become ‘ethical’ when they are seen to constitute a relation of ‘otherness’ in which the two terms are defined in mutual resistance.

The disputes arising from such a relation can only be settled by the imposition of an ‘ought’: one ought (for example) to behave out of respect for the law rather than simply pursuing the pleasures of the moment because, for whatever reason, adherence to the law possesses a higher value than the pursuit of pleasure.

The roots of Italian idealism are to be found in the work of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Naples. Years before Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Vico's New Science (1725) conceived of knowledge as acquired through a self-generative process. To Vico, thought in its development is first ‘poetic wisdom’ then becomes understanding and finally achieves unity of truth and certainty. Thought here does not merely represent, but actively creates reality. It is, moreover, conscious of its own generative process (verum et factum convertuntur).

Vico's epistemological idealism is bolstered by a religious metaphysics which postulates the unity of human thought with divine thought. The ‘common sense’ (sensus communis) of humanity, which orders the social and historical world is thus also identical with divine providence, and this identity acts to verify or ground the knowledge engendered by human thought.

Vico's ideas, however, won little recognition at the time. Thus the revival of idealism in Italy at the University of Naples, dating from 1840, was initially focused on Hegel, rather than Vico. The result was a Neapolitan school of Hegelianism. For A. Vera, leader of the ‘orthodox Hegelians’ at Naples, thought represented the ‘absolute idea’ in Hegelian terminology, which stood outside of human control. But two other central figures in Neapolitan Hegelianism, B. Spaventa (1813–83) and F. De Sanctis (1817–83), rejected this transcendence. Connecting Vico (whom they had rediscovered) to Hegelianism, Spaventa and De Sanctis defended a radical humanism that located all truth and reality solely in this world.

To say that Keats was fascinated by art approaches understatement. The poetry of that fascination is unequivocal. From the early sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, to the sculptured figures of the Hyperion poems and the odes of 1819, Keats returns to the world of art, haunting its forms in return for the ways in which those forms haunt his poetics. Still other poems include ekphrastic elements: On a Leander, his verse-epistle to Reynolds, and Ode to Psyche. As readers have long recognized, Keats's poetry often takes the mode of ekphrasis, the verbal or rhetorical description of artwork: a funerary urn, the Elgin Marbles, and typically, figures that Keatsian narrators present as though they were art objects - Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes, the goddesses in Ode to Indolence, the fallen Titans of the Hyperion poems.

Although the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was founded in 1924, the work of the Institute took on its distinctive theoretical character only after 1930, when the philosopher Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) became its director. At the core of Horkheimer's programme for the Institute was a commitment to multi-disciplinary, empirical social science projects, articulated within a Marxist social philosophy.

The Institute's Marxism (initially developed by Horkheimer along with Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979) was firmly within the scope of western Marxism opened up by Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1923). On the one hand, Marx was situated within the main tradition of German idealist philosophy, and thus as an inheritor of Kant and Hegel. On the other hand, Marx's own social and economic theories were developed in order to provide a more adequate account of twentieth-century capitalism than that provided by orthodox Marxism. The core concern of the Institute's research programme was the problem of the relationship between base and superstructure in late capitalism, articulated in terms of the connections between economic life, the psychological development of individuals, and changes within science, religion and art, law, custom, public opinion and popular culture. Psychological and cultural mechanisms were to be explicated in terms of their function in the continuing latency of objective class conflict. Thus, during the 1930s and 1940s, alongside the major Institute projects on anti-semitism, Nazism and authoritarianism, Institute members published on economic theory, class structure, trade unionism, law and the Asiatic mode of production, together with important theoretical and empirical work on mass and high culture.

The development of literary theory in the Federal Republic of Germany was deeply affected by demands at the end of the 1960s for new critical analyses of the intellectual traditions which played a role in Germany's catastrophic past. Despite the moves to ‘de-Nazify’ German society in the Federal Republic after the war, much of academic and other institutional life continued to be controlled by those who had at least been compromised during the Nazi period, if they had not been active Nazis. It was, above all, the Student Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s which made an issue of the persisting role of such people, and of the affluence of a society that had so recently been morally, socially and economically bankrupt. The Student Movement concentrated on ideas in the Marxist tradition, including the Frankfurt School, which had been suppressed in the Nazi period and neglected in the immediate post-war years. These ideas were rather crudely deployed to question the legitimacy of capitalist economies in the west which were involved in supporting repressive regimes in the Third World. Such questioning was supposed to lead to revolutionary change, but it has since become clear that much of the energy invested in the idea of revolution in fact depended on feelings relating to the unresolved injustices of the Nazi period. The effects of the Student Movement on the humanities were evident in a tendency to disregard aesthetic issues in favour of approaches which looked at literary texts in particular solely as the products of historical and ideological conflicts. Even though these approaches were reductive, they did draw attention to weaknesses in theories of the inherently humanising or revelatory effects of art, which were still widely held, despite the events of the Nazi period. At the height of the Student Movement the more differentiated critical resources available in the work of Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School were largely neglected.

Naming the unnamable: what is postmodernism?

In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed that Enlightened modernity was now caught in a ‘legitimation crisis’ from which it could not recover. By the mid-eighties, La condition postmoderne enjoyed hierophantic status as the book which had completed the Nietzschean project of persuading us of the death of the ‘grand narratives’ of God, metaphysics and science. Twenty years on, the discourse which named that crisis seems to have developed its own terminal symptoms. In a rather Beckettian image, Lyotard has recently declared that postmodernism is now an ‘old man's occupation, rummaging in the dustbin of finality to find remains’. Richard Rorty (defender of consensus but hardly secret sharer of Lyotard's postmodern anti-foundationalism) has also come to see the term as so elastic as to be useless even for his own neo-pragmatic purposes. He has, he now tells us, ‘given up on the attempt to find something common to Michael Graves’ buildings, Pynchon's and Rushdie's novels, Ashberry's poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida’. So, has postmodernism become a victim of that very built-in obsolescence which was central to its diagnosis of all intellectual or artistic culture within late capitalism? Is it possible any longer to define postmodernism? Perhaps the task is comparable to an attempt to force a rainbow back through the geometrical contours of Newton's prism.

Still, if we accept Fredric Jameson's belief that the value of postmodern expression lies precisely in its attempt to name the unnameable, to find a form in which to represent the seemingly unrepresentable global networks of technologised late capitalist culture, then there is some historical justification in attempting, yet again, to name the unnameable which is postmodernism.

Exploring the relationship between literary criticism – English as an academic discipline – and the university during the course of the twentieth century, this essay argues that demands made on the university by the state have had a formative influence on the conception of literary criticism. At the beginning of the century the study of literature in Britain was seen both as a means of promoting pride in national identity and as a corrective to the materialist tendencies of the age. As the millennium approaches, there is widespread scepticism about whether ‘literature’ can maintain its status as a superior form of writing, which has resulted in a shift of focus from privileged works – the canon – to a study of the diversity of cultural forms and the relations between them. Such changes take place in the context of a move from the university as the provider of a liberal education, concerned with the development of the individual, to a more vocational one, concerned with the needs of the economy.

From the 1870s there was increasing pressure on the universities to forge closer links with industry. This was due to fears of slow growth and the increasing intensity of foreign competition, particularly from Germany. To meet this need, civic colleges were created in industrial cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. The attitude of the two ancient universities to this development is summed up in J. S. Mill's remark that ‘[u]niversities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining a livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers and physicians or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.'

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote at length about the history of the novel and its roots in popular-festive culture, and his historical writing is often celebrated for its extraordinary erudition and breadth of reference. Nevertheless it often conveys the impression that history is simply a canvas on which Bakhtin is painting philosophical, political and maybe even religious pictures. This is partly due to the wild historical generalisations one finds throughout Bakhtin's works, generalisations for which Bakhtin scholars have always had to invent unconvincing excuses, but is more a matter of the aggressive, partisan, almost celebratory tone of Bakhtin's literary-historical writing. For Bakhtin did not see literary history as a succession of events. He saw the passage of time as a mountainside down which flowed, with an initially erratic and faltering momentum, an ever deepening, ever more forceful current of historical ‘becoming’, which, by the time it struck bottom, had become a torrent sweeping all before it. History was the focus of his writing not in the sense of a discipline or a field of problems and concerns, but as the great achievement of modern European culture, to be protected and cherished by critical and philosophical thought.

From roughly the middle of the 1930s until his death in 1975, Bakhtin argued that the European novel was the purest cultural embodiment of this historical becoming, and that, consequently, the theory of the novel was an act of supreme historical self-consciousness. In the many essays and notes he dedicated to the history and theory of this genre, he insisted on both its uniqueness and its centrality to the modern age. The novel was not just ‘another’ genre.

The last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century saw a major change in Spanish American arts and letters: Spanish intellectuals began to look north, reversing the European romantic artists’ movement towards the south; at the same time the state of mutual ignorance that had existed before the 1890s between Spain and Spanish America was transformed by the springing up of new, fertile cultural relationships. This development was symbolically marked by the disintegration of the old Spanish empire in 1898, when the last of the old Spanish colonies finally gained independence. After 1898, intellectuals no longer saw Spain as the repressive power, they began to see it instead as a victim of emergent North American imperialism, already felt to be a threat to Spanish America.

Both Spanish and Spanish American writers were imbued with European philosophical, literary and artistic ideas. Spanish painters received grants to study in Europe, especially Italy; Zuloaga established himself in Paris; Sorolla won the Grand Prix of the Paris exhibition of 1900; Picasso and Gris made decisive contributions to the cubist revolution in Paris. In Spanish America, French symbolism and parnassianism in particular deeply influenced those forerunners of ‘modernismo’, such as the Mexican Gutiérrez Nájera (1859–95), the Colombian Asunción Silva (1865–96), and the Cuban independentist hero Martí (1853–95). In Spain, the members of the 98 Generation also delved into European literature and philosophy.

This volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism is the last in a series of nine offering a scholarly survey of criticism and theory from classical antiquity to the present. Such a broad historical overview shows that the partiality of critical judgement has been recognised for almost as long as literature has existed; so much so, indeed, that the conscious attempt to make allowance for it marks the emergence of literary criticism as a discipline that seeks to achieve a certain judicious objectivity of viewpoint while perforce acknowledging its own dependence on rhetoric and strategies of persuasion. In the late twentieth century, moreover, critics have become so keenly aware of the cultural and ideological factors informing every act of interpretation that any claim to offer a fairly unbiased (let alone neutral or objective) survey of the field now seems more problematic than ever. Still it is essential to a project like this that such qualms should not be allowed to paralyse judgement or leave every sentence hedged around with qualifying doubts. As a matter of broad editorial policy, we have decided that the problem can best be confronted through a detailed discussion of historical context and emergent patterns of influence, along with a willingness to address such issues explicitly where need arises.

The guiding principle of Volume 9 is a sustained engagement with history, both in the sense that it raises issues of a markedly critical-historiographic import, and also in so far as it offers case studies of various historically situated movements and schools of thought. The last three volumes in the series are all concerned with twentieth-century developments, a weighting that might seem somewhat excessive, given the sheer chronological range of the series as a whole. However these volumes are strongly contrasted in terms of their distinctive emphases and governing interests.

‘To live or to recount … You have to choose.’ This is the dilemma facing Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea (1938): one either involves oneself in the world of action or exists in a state of distant, conceptual abstraction. Existentialism is a philosophy of the gap, the gap between concepts and experience. It affects both ethics and epistemology. On the one hand, how does one represent – through art, literature or philosophy – lived experience? On the other, how does one live in a world increasingly defined through representation, where ‘representation’ can extend from the self-image of the individual to the human possibilities created by advances in technology? Sartre's disavowal of the substantive Cartesian self might give the impression that he is advocating an amoral nihilism. However, he in fact wants an immersed, committed existence, an adventure or a project, but is all too aware that the order granted by concepts and grammar is only to be found in literature, and not available to the individual. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between art, philosophy and experience in phenomenology and existentialism. I concentrate on Sartre and suggest points of contact between his ideas and the work of Nietzsche, Husserl, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. The gap which Roquentin opens for us between writing or living, I shall argue, is not another binarism in the history of philosophy, demarcating two irreconcilable opposites, but a state of affairs which, for Sartre, is an unavoidable aspect of our experiential participation in the world.

Existentialism emerges from phenomenology, and this, in turn, derives from transcendental idealism. The line can be traced back from de Beauvoir and Sartre through Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, Brentano and, ultimately, to Kant. Phenomenology asserts that we are immersed in the world and implicated within it, as opposed to being observers whose thoughts and actions are formulated at a distance from events. Kant is the first to argue that our faculties are always already active in structuring the world.

Storytelling is the obvious link between psychoanalysis and literature. Sixty years before Jacques Lacan described the unconscious as structured like a language, its method was labelled the ‘talking cure’ by an early patient. Most psychoanalytic methods produce texts, and most use texts such as dreams, narratives, slips of the tongue, jokes, but also bodily symptoms for their investigations. Freud employs Greek myths (most prominently Oedipus and Narcissus) for his crucial concepts. Jung scrutinises fairy tales and folklore, eastern and western religion, even alchemy. Neither differentiates between stories by actual patients and those inherited by literature and culture. This trend continues into the late twentieth century, as is evident in Lacan's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Purloined Letter’. Eventually, psychoanalytic texts themselves have become objects of analysis, as in the writings of Abraham and Torok, who analyse Freud's analysis of the pathological case study the ‘Wolf-Man’.

Text-based in its methods, psychoanalysis shares with literature the poiesis of images and expressions, the poetics of their arrangement, the grammar of narratives, but also a theory of interpretation. The latter frequently abandons the idea of an origin of symptoms (in empirical fact or transcendent metaphysics) and instead refers to other texts, previous traumas or archetypal images and stories that are closely related to myths. Modern literary theory calls this ‘intertextuality’. Psychoanalytic theories also refer to their material in literary terms: the poetry of dreams, the drama of ur-scenes, and the narratives that emerge from them.

Describing himself as “one who passes his life among books and thoughts on books” (KL 1.274), Keats “feasted upon”great poets with extraordinary relish, an appetitive reading he put in terms of delightful eating, drinking, imbibing, and inhaling. His copies of mighty poetic forebears teem with marks and annotations that witness a critical engagement as well as a rapid, enthusiastic absorption of words and thoughts. This poetic “food”(“How many bards”) could provide creative inspiration when Keats craved it most, consolation in times of distress, and themes for his own poetry (On First Looking into Chapman's Homer; On Sitting Down to Read “King Lear” Once Again). The “Remembrance of Chaucer,” he buoyantly affirmed during a lull in the writing of Endymion in May 1817, “will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball” (KL 1.147). Keats often began writing with a ritual of welcoming into his mind “throngs”of elder bards whose “pleasing chime”inspired him (“How many bards”).As he matured, such chimes could be less pleasing, even sometimes a convulsive din, provoking sensations of insuffi- ciency before such creative amplitude or apprehensions of not finding a voice of his own among the throng. “Aye, the count / Of mighty Poets is made up; the scroll / Is folded by the Muses,” laments the narrator of Endymion; “the sun of poesy is set” (2.723-25, 729). Yet for all this seeming finish, the play of predecessor poets in his own voice vitally informed Keats's creative efforts and his sense of poetic identity. He envisioned these interactions as a “greeting of the Spirit” (KL1.243), a partnership in “immortal freemasonry” - as he described actor Edmund Kean's way with Shakespeare (“Mr. Kean”;Cook, 346).

A history of African American literature has to include some discussion of those deceptively transparent terms ‘literature’ and ‘African American’ and the issues raised by their juxtaposition. In recent years poststructuralist and postmodern critical practices have dismantled literary canons and called into question the very notion of literature, yet few literary anthologies are as daring in their selection of texts as The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published in 1997. The inclusion of folk tales, work songs, spirituals and sermons, as well as a speech and prison letter by Martin Luther King, Jr., an extract from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and lyrics by the rap band Public Enemy, suggests something of the challenge that African American cultural production presents to a conventional understanding of literature. The anthology, which comes complete with CD, dissolves the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and demands a theory of literature which can take account of oral traditions, musical forms and the spoken voice, as well as the often explicitly political content and context of black cultural production. Such a theory of literature, which reconsiders the primacy of the written text and the relation of art to politics and propaganda, would also need to include a recognition of the enforced illiteracy of African Americans during slavery and the role that the concept of writing and literature played in ideologies of white supremacy.

The hybrid term ‘African American’, which is used, paradoxically, to figure the identity of a body of writing, raises a number of complex issues that will also be addressed in this chapter. What, for instance, does it imply about the relationship of black writing in America to the cultural texts, practices and traditions of African and other black diaspora populations? Just as importantly, what is the place of African American writing in ‘mainstream’ American literature? Should the African American literary tradition be viewed as supplementary to the national canon of mostly white authors, or can it be read as challenging the whole rationale behind the selection of the literary works which help define American identity?

The concept of the ‘history of ideas’ is associated with the work and legacy of a single person, the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962). Literature, ideas and their possible historical interrelation are, however, problems of very wide interest and import for twentieth-century literary studies. Once the term ‘criticism’ covers all forms of literary study and once ‘ideas’ and their possible history are seen to overlap with – and to contest – other constructions that are available to make sense of literature, the topic of literary criticism and the history of ideas appears as but one version of the problematic relations between literature and history that dominate twentieth-century literary studies.

Lovejoy's masterwork, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea was delivered in 1933 as the William James Lectures at Harvard and published in 1936; it remains, together with some of his collected Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), the signal contribution of the history of ideas to the concerns of literary criticism. Very briefly put, ‘ideas’ for Lovejoy are ‘the persistent dynamic factors … that produce effects in the history of thought’, ‘the elements, the primary and persistent or recurrent dynamic units, of the history of thought’ (pp. 5, 7). In an explicit analogy to chemistry, Lovejoy considers his objects of study to be ‘component elements’ of the larger compounds of thoughts, doctrines or systems in intellectual history, and he wishes to discriminate and trace the workings of such ‘unit-ideas’ (p. 3).