Browsing by Subject "Criticism"

This dissertation considers the role of the critic in democratic political culture by engaging Socrates. Since Socrates so often stands as an exemplar for many different styles of critical activity, both in political rhetoric and in popular culture, I address the roots of these many figures of Socrates by examining the multiple aspects of Socrates as they appear in Plato's dialogues. Starting from the different metaphors that Socrates uses to describe himself - the stingray, the master of erotics, the midwife, the practitioner of the true political art, and the gadfly - I parse these different strands of Socrates' character and assess their coherence. While each of these descriptions captures a different angle of Socrates' activity vis-à-vis Athenian democracy, I argue that together they also hold one essential aspect in common: Socrates' strange relationship to Athens as both connected and disconnected, immanent in his criticism and yet radically so. As strange both in the context of Athens and in relation to his interpreters, I further advance that the figure of Socrates suggests a kind of political activity committed to disturbance and displacement while also working across, with, and against conventional boundaries and languages. Moreover, I maintain that the Socrates suggests new forms of critical associations that take up his practice of philosophy in democratic culture today.

This dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. Each chapter explores test cases of this potential through a close analysis of a novel and argues that in order to understand such literary structure one must look beyond literature to the wider episteme of modernism. Each chapter therefore positions literature alongside a related field, where the affinities are shown to be found not in a shared content but in a shared form. The chapters include explorations of: the problem of language in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying read alongside advertising; the problem of continuity and fragmentation in Ford’s Parade’s End read alongside security and administrative governance; and the problem of perception in Woolf’s The Waves read alongside physics. As the discussion of these pairings proceeds from chapter to chapter, it is shown that the fragmentation of each respective novel reveals an increasingly successful utopian experiment in alternative forms of human relationality. At an additional register, this dissertation also shows that such experimentation requires a redefined role for the critic, for the novels each draw the reader into their texts by not only representing but enacting fragmentation in a way that requires the reader to participate in the utopian experiment. Through the practice of criticism, the critic is therefore implicated in the modernist project, and complicit in all of the political and ethical concerns the project carries.