Stanford University Press Blog:

Featured Titles

Enjoy 30% off on the books listed below on our special sup.org Banned Books page by using the discount code BANNED30 at checkout, valid between 9/16/22 and 9/26/22.

Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution

Brett Gary

A rich account of 1920s to 1950s New York City, starring an eclectic mix of icons like James Joyce, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey—all led by an unsung hero of free expression and reproductive rights. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was experiencing an awakening. Victorian-era morality was being challenged by the introduction of sexual modernism and women's rights into popular culture, the arts, and science. Set during this first sexual revolution, when civil libertarian-minded lawyers overthrew the yoke of obscenity laws, Dirty Works focuses on a series of significant courtroom cases that were all represented by the same lawyer: Morris L. Ernst.

Negativity and the cultural legacy of the 1960s

BRUCE ROBBINS

Photograph of Matthew Arnold by Elliott & Fry , circa 1883 - National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When the publication date of my new book Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction » was announced, a number of people got in touch with me on social media and told me that what caught their interest was the word “polemical” in the subtitle. I hope they will not be disappointed by the modest degree of belligerence they will find in it. The book is also meant as an introduction to cultural theory.

(People also said they loved the cover. Thank you, David Drummond! Your brilliant design is better than the book underneath it.)

I start from the premise that fighting is already ongoing. As the US goes into the season of midterm elections, no one needs to be told that the Culture Wars of the last century are still very much alive. What is more surprising is that attacks on teachers for teaching seemingly uncontroversial matters, like the atrocity of slavery, have found an echo among literary critics themselves, some of whom accuse their colleagues of being too negative about our cultural heritage (“our” could have irritated quotation marks around it), and too negative in general.

How negative is too negative? There is a lot to fight over.

The negativity is often blamed on the heritage of the 60s movements that championed race, gender, and sexuality rights. Those movements largely demanded greater representation in the name of an expanded democracy; logically enough, they were not always respectful of a past in which they and theirs had gone unrepresented, or worse. But there is much more to say on the subject. Methodologically speaking, I would argue, the broadest and most influential legacy of the 60s was not “theory” but the imperative to put texts into their historical context, and from the perspective of those who assume that the great texts of the past are timeless, contextualization will look like negativity—like tearing those texts down, judging the past by the moral standards of the present, showing it disrespect. This is not entirely false. On the other hand, a great deal of entirely “positive” or “appreciative” criticism has been enabled and encouraged by “identity politics”—it is perhaps not seen as appreciative only because of the particular social content that is being appreciated.

Continue reading "The Charms of the Polemical" »