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Critical Theory: Practices
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More generally, critical theory may describe any attempt to understand practices of criticism, interpretation, and historical understanding of social action, including especially that of writing. An increased self-consciousness about the role of the critic, and the different social and historical circumstances that interfere with communication and translation, is characteristic of post-modernism, and this topic has been expressed in a variety of literary forms. However, it may be doubted whether the resulting reflections are always either critical or theoretical in any sense recognized in the philosophy of science. See ... Derrida, Foucault.
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The work of the 1930s critical theorists was deeply historical and their investigations took the form of a development of a theory of the present age which depicted the transition to a new stage of capitalism and of fascism. They reconstructed the Marxian categories of reification, commodification, exchange, exploitation, and domination in order to analyze the dynamics of the contemporary era and to give these categories new social content. These "totalizing" categories were used to capture the dynamics of contemporary society and to describe the processes through which capitalist hegemony was established and the individual was dominated by her or his society. They practiced what they called "immanent critique," which compared society to its own norms. During an era when fascist, communist, and other totalitarian state forms were eroding human rights and individual freedom, destroying democracy, producing new hierarchies and atavistic ideologies, the classical Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, justice, and individualism could be used as norms of social critique. In an inhuman society, humanism possessed socially critical potential.
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The practical alternative offers a solution to this problem by taking critical social theory in the direction of a pragmatic reinterpretation of the verification of critical inquiry that turns seemingly intractable epistemic problems into practical ones. The role of critical social science is to supply methods for making explicit just the sort of self-examination necessary for on-going normative regulation of social life. This practical regulation includes the governing norms of critical social science itself. Here the relation of theory to practice is a different one than among the original pragmatists: more than simply clarifying the relation of means and ends for decisions on particular issues, these social sciences demand reflection upon institutionalized practices and their norms of cooperation. Reflective practices cannot remain so without critical social inquiry, and critical social inquiry can only be tested in such practices. One possible epistemic improvement is the transformation of social relations of power and authority into contexts of democratic accountability among political equals (Bohman 1999a; Epstein 1996).
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Critical theory acknowledges its presuppositions: it holds that the public needs remedies to social ills and injustice manifested by subjectively experienced or objectively attributable discontent. As a research program it acknowledges the bias that researchers impute these ills on the public. CT, then, recommends itself as a framework for and method to see which social-psychological or anthropological assumptions substantiate the thesis that an individual responsiveness to rational arguments remain possible within any deformation of social life. Critique of LIS, then, most of all must ask “in what ways is library theory and practice actually deforming, despite the rhetoric and model of healing”? Habermas expressed this need as the drive behind the human species’ “emancipatory interests” that focuses on the experience of a discourse praxis that is structurally present in a state of non-coercive equality.
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This new edition of the classic guide offers a thorough and accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory. It provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African-American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading. This book can be used as the only text in a course or as a precursor to the study of primary theoretical works. It motivates readers by showing them what critical theory can offer in terms of their practical understanding of literary texts and in terms of their personal understanding of themselves and the world in which they live. Both engaging and rigorous, it is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.
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Note that critical theory differs from post-modern approaches to social theory. Theorists in the latter perspective tend to argue that modernity has ended, or that modernity must be rejected in its totality. Post-modernists may even reject social theor y and political practice whereas critical theorists tend to theorize extensively and some argue that politics can be used to pursue progress. Critical theorists generally tend to have a comprehensive and overall social theory and an idea of progress and a better world, even if they are unable to find ways of getting there. In contrast, a post-modern approach is more likely to be associated with rejection of comprehensive, universal theory.
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