Literature and Politics

This paper argues the case for the Frankfurt School approach to literature as an alternative to the two most widespread approaches in English-language literary criticism today. These approaches are ideology critique grounded in a politics of interest or power differentials, on the one hand, and ethical criticism framed by moral altruism or virtue ethics, on the other hand. By contrast, I propose, the perspective of the Frankfurt School from Adorno to Habermas involves a clear connection between the normative justifications for that politics of freedom which informs ideology critique, and an analysis of the text in its socio-historical context that refuses to reduce it to its political positioning or moral theme.

To render the difference between the Frankfurt School approach and the literary-critical mainstream in the starkest possible terms, I argue that the approach of the Frankfurt School preserves what is valid in Lukács’ humanist vision whilst shedding its teleological baggage and its prescriptive aesthetics. The Frankfurt School provides for a multi-dimensional account of the literary work as an imaginative conjecture in response to problematic situations in the lifeworld. From this perspective, literary works have a utopian vocation and a role to play in ethical regeneration, cognitive mapping and the exploration of new structures of feeling. To sketch the sort of insights that this approach might offer, I examine some of the debates around Shakespeare in Renaissance Studies, outlining the differences between new historicist and cultural materialist, deconstructive and feminist positions, and the perspective that I advocate.