Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1974"

The understanding of faith: Interpretation and criticism

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Interpretation of the Future 2. The Context and Value of Faith-Talk 3. Linguistic Criteria 4. Theological Criteria 5. Correlation between Human Question and Christian Answer 6. The New Critical Theory 7. The New Critical Theory and Theological Hermeneutics Bibliography Index

Habermas talking: An interview

Abstract: It was at Frankfurt University that Jurgen Habermas made his reputation as the new theoretical force continuing the tradition of the Horkheimer-AdornoMarcuse brand of Critical Theory. It was also at Frankfurt that Habermas' popularity with the Left student movement changed dramatically from mutual support to bitter condemnation from many students. In recent years, owing to a combination of new trends in the German Left and also his own retreat into research work at Starnberg, Habermas has become more and more isolated from German Left activists. On the one hand, he is roundly (but unfairly) condemned as a "cop-out" by many elements of the existing student movement who still retain incorrect memories of his role in the student-administration confrontation at Frankfurt. Habermas did not call the police in at Frankfurt (in fact he strongly opposed this move behind the scenes but could not bring himself to publicly criticize Adorno due to his personal friendship and justifiably great concern over Adorno's deteriorating health), but he did criticize various student tactics as being short-sighted and counter-productive which earned him abundant criticism from many students. On the other hand, he has never been loved by the academic establishment as well as being almost universally excluded from Marxist ranks in Germany and abroad (with the notable exception of Marxists such as the Praxis group in Yugoslavia).

An Essay on Critical Method, Applied to the Comedia

Abstract: M Y PURPOSE HERE IS, first of all, to urge that a more modern and relevant approach to Comedia criticism is desirable, specifically one that will offer a realistic perspective on the relationship between traditional scholarship and modern literary criticism; second, to advocate greater critical rigor, which will encompass eschewing the intentional fallacy, hierarchies, cults of personality, biographical and cultural determinism, and moralizing; and, finally, to insist on the autonomy of the critic and on viewing criticism as a cumulative enterprise. When I speak of critics and criticism here and 'throughout, I have in mind academic critics and academic criticism; that is, the type of literary criticism practiced in the academy. A distinction needs to be made between -the academic critic's role when he deals with primary source material and when he writes reviews. In the latter capacity, he will almost invariably reach some conclusion concerning the value of the secondary source material being reviewed. In -the role of reviewer, he functions much like the drama and film critics who review current offerings in those areas. In reviews, of whatever kind, relatively subjective and negative criticism tends to flourish. In literary cri'ticism, the task should always be viewed and the criticism expressed in objective and consistently positive terms. Let me summarize briefly the current situation. With the exception of those of the British School who have been influenced at least indirectly by I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), it is clear that the majority of Comedia scholars are precisely that: scholars, rather than literary critics.' Among American Comediantes, a disproportionate amount of energy has traditionally been devoted to activities marginal to 'the explication of the literary artifact; specifically, to editing, biography, bibliography, staging, questions of influence and authorship, and preoccupation with antiquarianism and extrinsic concerns in general.2 The second truly significant book of this century, in point of its influence upon critical theory, has been largely ignored by those who publish on Golden-Age drama, and indeed by Hispanists at large. I refer to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). There have been a few attempts at interpretation based on myth and archetype, but these have looked more directly to Jung, or perhaps Frazer, than to Frye; in other words, they look more to psychology and anthropology than to the myths and archetypes of literature itself. There have also been a few Freudian and Marxist interpretations, but, except for Noel Salomon's work, none of the lot has been particularly productive or convincing." The point I would make is the obvious one that we are, in the majority, at some distance from the mainstream of modern critical theory and

Critical Theory and Its Future

Abstract: h N THE 1930s, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse gave an interpretation of critical theory and its aims. Both Horkheimer and Marcuse prefaced the republication in 1968 of their earlier essays with a reassessment of the state of critical theory, and both contended that changing historical circumstances in the period from the 1930s to the present undermined certain crucial presuppositions of the theory and necessitated modifications in its aims and structure.! Their basic presupposition had been that the transition from capitalism to socialism in at least some of the European nations was a real and immediate possibility. Their basic intention was to assist that transition (in however small a measure) by unmasking a problem which had received insufficient attention in the Marxist literature up to their day-namely, the inhibition of the revolutionary potential of the masses through the manifold devices of culture which had resulted from the centuries-long internalization of

The Political Contradiction in Adorno's Critical Theory

Abstract: Adorno's intellectual biography, even in its most aesthetic abstractions, is marked by the experience of Fascism. The mode in which this experience is reflected—by deciphering from the works of art the insoluble relation between critique and suffering—constitutes the uncompromising claim to negation, while simultaneously setting limits to it. “Damaged life,” through reflection on fascist domination as generated by the natural economic catastrophies of the capitalist mode of production, is aware of its entanglement in the ideological contradictions of bourgeois individualism, whose irrevocable decay it has understood; at the same time, it cannot disengage from it. Fascist terror produces not only the understanding of the hermetic compulsiveness of highly industrialized societies, it also violates the subjectivity of the theoretician and reinforces the class barriers against his cognitive ability.

Critical Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge: A Response to Martin Jay

Abstract: The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research has been revived in America as an inspiration for critical thought at the very moment when it has died in Europe as an institution. A successful reanimation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School will thus have to concern itself with the problem of acquiring a mode of thought, not with an exercise in academic nostalgia for heroic positions once taken, lively debates once held, trans-Atlantic migrations once made. One cannot revive the Frankfurt School as a museum, one can only renew its criticisms against the new forms its old opponents have taken. Many of us have attempted to do this in the last decade, at first often without knowing that our objections against our teachers had been voiced before, by individuals whose books we only slowly came to know.

The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory

Abstract: A number of recent contributions to Marxist theory published in England have defined their problematic in terms of deriving from the Central European tradition inaugurated by such theorists as Lukács, Korsch, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse in the second and third decades of this century, and subsequently renewed in the post-war years—principally in the work of Jürgen Habermas. In contrast to the treatment of Marx as the spiritual father of Marxism-Leninism or as the chief ideologist of state-socialism or social democracy, their approach has been characterized as the “revival of a philosophical tradition which can be properly called Hegelian.”

Watergate: Government by negation

Abstract: The perspective of critical theory pretends to offer no concrete predictions of either the events or the public understanding of matters such as Watergate. But it does offer some analyses of the bases of "Watergate" events and why these events are presently part of the "public".1 Most empirical sociology, as Birnbaum puts it, "is largely a strained gloss on a reality we do not believe we can change".2 In essence, critical sociology offers itself as the negation of that reality, asserting-the possibility of change. Aware of the prophetically affirmative nature of most social science, critical theory eschews concrete prophecy with the negative.3

The Abdication of Philosophy = The Abdication of Man: A Critical Study of the Interdependence of Philosophy as Critical Theory and Man as a Free Individual

Abstract: 2. Introduction.- 3. What is Philosophy?.- 4. What is Man?.- 5. Contemporary Forms of the Abdication of Philosophy and Contemporary Forms of Human Thinking and Human Existence.- 6. The Abdication of Philosophy and the Problem of Freedom.- 7. Conclusion.