John Frow, “On Literature in Cultural Studies”
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In the cafe culture of upmarket bookshops, in the cultural promotion apparatus of festivals and chat-shows and prizes, and in Hollywood’s version of the art movie, Literature remains a timeless product of genius and feeling, directly apprehended in the heart by the empathetic reader. None of this is at all far from Harold Bloom’s reverential resuscitation of the Bard, or Lentricchia’s profession of an untheorizable love of literature, or what Sedgwick calls ‘‘the organization of liberal arts education as an expensive form of masterpiece theatre’’. Indeed, the literary canon never went away: it was always there as negative theology in deconstruction, and the Norton Anthology has simply gotten fatter. Literary criticism remains an important part of a marketing system and of a highbrow taste culture which it blindly serves.
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