From a blue tie to an obscene baby bottle: notes on current literary criticism

Abstract

The essay presents the general argument of Joseph North’s recent book Literary Criticism – A Concise Political History, related to a dispute between what the author calls the “critical” and the “historicist-contextualist” paradigms throughout English literary criticism. It has a twofold objective: it attempts to extrapolate some of North’s claims to the Brazilian context and draws attention to artistic developments from Modernism onwards that were left aside by North. Before presenting North’s argument, it revisits some of Arthur C. Danto’s ideas on the nature of meaning in art that will lead to some considerations on the possibilities of recovering the critical paradigm discussed by North in the context of the monopoly that the Culture Industry seems to hold over the contemporary education of the senses.