Double agent

"In recent decades, an enormous gulf has opened up between academic critics addressing their professional colleagues, often in abstruse or technical terms, and the kind of public critic who writes about books, films, plays, music, and art for a wider audience. How did this breach develop between specialists and generalists, between theorists and practical critics, between humanists and antihumanists? What, if anything, can he done to repair it? Can criticism once again become part of a common culture, meaningful to scholars and general readers alike?" "Morris Dickstein's new book, Double Agent, makes an impassioned plea for criticism to move beyond the limits of poststructuralist theory, eccentric scholarship, blinkered formalism, opaque jargon, and politically motivated cultural studies. Emphasizing the relation of critics to the larger world of history and society, Dickstein takes a fresh look at the long tradition of cultural criticism associated with the independent "man of letters," and traces the development of new techniques of close reading in the aftermath of modernism. He examines the work of critics who reached out to a larger public in essays and books that were themsel