Introduction: The Situation of Criticism

Summary

Among his other prodigious contributions to literature, a great many of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on literary and cultural criticism were published over the course of thirty years in ten volumes, each bearing the title Situations. (We know them as Situations I–X, with individual volumes bearing different subtitles, published between 1947 and 1976.) It is telling, but not surprising, that Sartre would use this title, for his philosophy was rooted in what Fredric Jameson has referred to as “the logic of the situation,” which entails a thoroughgoing recognition of the fundamental situatedness of the individual subject in relation to others at all times and places. We find ourselves, always and already, in a certain situation, which conditions our sense of self and our comportment toward the world. This a fairly basic, existential reality, but by engaging in critical practice, we find ourselves especially attuned to the ways that the situations in which we find both ourselves and the texts under consideration affect the project in innumerable ways. The situation of criticism is, in this sense, doubly situated, for it entails a persistent consciousness of its own situation while assessing other situations. In describing his attraction to the dialectic, for example, which is also to say his sense of how a properly critical practice would work, Jameson has said that “the emphasis on the logic of the situation, the constant changeability of the situation, its primacy and the way in which it allows certain things to be possible and others not: that would lead to a kind of thinking I would call dialectical.” Whether it be explicitly characterized as dialectical or not, criticism is always practiced from and with respect to a given situation, and the awareness and consideration of the situatedness of both the critic’s subjective position and the objects of critique are essential aspects of literary and cultural criticism.

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a selection of essays that register this sense of situatedness amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. The title is, in part, a play on words, for the expression “a critical situation” is well known outside of academic literary studies to refer to matters of great urgency, often alarming and dangerous.