Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Theron Britt

Committee Member

Carey Mickalites

Committee Member

Donal Harris

Abstract

A certain critical consensus has been growing through the late 20th and early 21st centuries that ‘critique’—the general model of and approach for academic analysis for literary and cultural studies in Western universities and academics—has ‘run out of steam’. Its postures of suspicion and negation, its various methods of interrogation and unmasking, and its general orientation towards deconstruction and subversion (as opposed to construction and position), has hit a wall on its returns politically, intellectually, and ethically. Consequently, a crisis in the humanities has emerged (or reemerged) wherein the need has returned to justify what it is exactly that the humanities are for and what it is exactly that academics in the humanities do. Various responses have emerged from and to this crisis, from the ‘theological turn’ to actor-network theories to the variegated approaches of ‘postcritique.’ These responses, however, struggle to adequately answer the challenges faced by the stalling of critique precisely because they remain within the orbit of critique—its categories, vocabularies, and assumptions—and so can only hit the same wall. The purpose of this work is to chart a different way forward, one that grounds literary and cultural studies, not simply in a new method or approach, but in categories, vocabularies, and assumptions entirely distinct from the ones of critique, i.e., ones grounded in the realist personalism tradition of 20th-century continental Christianity. This tradition emerged from the same historical events and intellectual-moral demands of the 19th and 20th centuries that critique did, and so speaks to the same concerns and ideas; yet it emerged from different presuppositions and approaches to the world, and thus offers different grounds and different ways forward. This dissertation will explicate the specifics on why critique has stalled and articulate in response personal theory, an approach to literature and culture that is as intellectually rigorous as critique and yet is grounded in the principles and practices of realist personalism. The hope of this dissertation is to provide (or at least demonstrate the possibility of) an alternative not only to critique but also to the various academic responses that remain within its orbit and so stall out just the same.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open Access

Download

Share

COinS