Contents; I: Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture; 1. Introduction; 2. The Moral Imagination in Modern American Criticism; 3. The Challenge of the "New New Criticism"; 4. Pragmatism as Critical Antidote: The Allopathic Medicine of Kenneth Burke; II: The Culture of Criticism and the Moral Imagination; 5. The Semiotics of Culture and the Diagnostics of Criticism: Clifford Geertz and the Moral Imagination; 6. The Humanities and Their Discontents: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Recovery of Alterity; 7. American Studies as Cultural Criticism
8. Recent Criticism and the Sediments of the SacredNotes; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z
Summary
The aim of this book is to challenge the assumptions made by the structuralist and post-structuralist schools of literary criticism. It defends and attempts to re-evaluate the kind of moral reflection associated with the critical legacy of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson
