Type

Text

Type

Thesis

Advisor

Scheckel, Susan | Johnston, Justin

Date

2017-12-01

Keywords

English literature

Department

Department of English

Language

en_US

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78248

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

According to Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, the titular discipline is today the site of a hegemonic historicist/contextualist practice. It ascended to this hegemony by edging out a different literary practice, what I call textualism, first thought through by the New Critics but also yoked by them to religious themes. North argues that since historicism/contextualism transforms literary criticism into a site of knowledge production and the commodification of literature as part of the “neoliberalization” of the university, the time has come to return to textualist practice so as to combat this trend, if only at a discursive level. By closely reading texts by Emerson and Thoreau in the context of the search for Freedom amidst Necessity, I attempt in this thesis to synthesize a mode of textualism that can play a role in combatting the specific historical conjuncture currently frustrating literary criticism and political struggles at large. | 81 pages

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