Abstract

The pluralism of “legitimate” approaches to texts characteristic of academic literary studies in the late 1960s and the 1970s, along with American institutions' general tendency to severe historical amnesia, has obscured New Criticism's ideological role from the 1940s on. In The Critical Twilight, Fekete clarifies and challenges the categories of this movement, which he calls “modern bourgeois critical theory” and he seeks to show how they “distort or exclude those structural variables that are essential for any meaningful project of social and human liberation” (xv).

Fekete's structuring of the text reveals the insidious nature and historical continuity of what, following T.S. Eliot, he calls “the tradition.”