Introduction
1. Criticism in the Wake of the 1960s
2. Criticizing
3. Lost Centrality
4. Aesthetics and the Governing of Others
5. Grievances
6. The Historical and the Transhistorical
7. Cosmopolitical Criticism in Deep Time
Conclusion
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and, most recently, The Beneficiary (2017).
"Urgent, bracing, and powerfully argued, Criticism and Politics
will be controversial in the best sense—inviting us all to debate
the purposes and presumptions of criticism on newly articulated
grounds."—Caroline Levine, Cornell University, author of Forms
"This is a vivid, engaging, and engaged piece of literary
criticism, as well as a vigorous defense of criticism as a method,
by one of its foremost practitioners."—Martin Puchner, Harvard
University, author of Literature for a Changing Planet
"For those who have been looking for a book to address, head on,
the complex connections between literary criticism and politics,
this is that book."—Mark Greif, Stanford University, author of
Against Everything
"This challenging, bold book helps answer the question of what
critics are for. Highly recommended"—S. J. Shaw, CHOICE
"There's much combined intellectual-governance work to do in
criticism's pursuit of power within current systems of knowledge.
The importance of Robbins's book is to show that this work is part
of criticism's past—while also insisting that it must be central to
its future."—Christopher Newfield, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Robbins's] erudite discussion of different literary theorists and
cultural critics (from Matthew Arnold to Judith Butler) makes the
book an introduction of a unique kind: it is a history of criticism
very unlike the ones that merely summarize arguments about
different modes of reading texts as made by the theorists from the
angle of political standpoints. It is polemical in the sense that
it does not shy away from taking sides with critics or positions,
even demonstrating intelligent ways of reading them that show
tremendous courage in raising difficult questions of literature and
criticism, not subscribing to the idea that
criticism-as-fault-finding is a less than noble activity."—Soni
Wadhwa, South Atlantic Review
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