Description

Critical theorists in our time sought foundations of knowledge because they knew there were none to be found, and critical scepticism became a convenient way of burying evidence and saving face. By now, however, no one is interested, the audience has gone home, and the case for studying literature needs to begin again. It cannot start too soon.’ In ‘Take Back the Past’, George Watson examines the reasons and motives for the failure of critical theory. Why, he asks, is it more fashionable to look knowing than to know? Why did literature destroy its own case? The book shows how the collapse of socialism in the late twentieth century and how the exposure of its unique responsibility for genocide panicked the prophets of advanced thought into the denial of knowledge itself. It is a story of betrayal and deceit – achieved, like a conjurer’s trick, by the suppression of evidence. George Watson is Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and editor of the ‘New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature’. He has published extensively on literature and political thought, including ‘The Lost Literature of Socialism’, ‘Never Ones for Theory, and ‘The English Ideology’, also published by The Lutterworth Press.