Serious imagination.(Imagining the Real: Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature)(Book Review)

Robert Grant Imagining the Real: Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pages, $90

The retreat of academic literary criticism from the public realm is one of the sadder phenomena of recent cultural history. In university bookshops the Eng. Lit. shelves are groaning with volumes catchily entitled "The Transgressive Body ...," "Engendering Discourse ...," and so on; but who buys them? The practitioners of the genre, certainly; some students (the ones with starry eyes and deep pockets), perhaps; but the general public--which used to rush out to purchase the latest book by Leavis or

Empson--hardly at all. Literary biography, now the only form of serious writing about literature to be bought by general readers, is the exception that proves the rule.

If you think that this matters, then you probably also assume that a culture is impoverished when the activity of thinking seriously about literature no longer forms part of it. In which case, you may also suppose (though it doesn't necessarily follow) that literature enables us to understand more deeply the values by which we live. Many great critics--Arnold and Leavis, to name two--have held such assumptions, and have contributed to a tradition in which literary criticism and moral thinking have been connected, not factitiously (as with the yoking of old texts to new ideological campaigns) but intimately. That tradition, once so central, has weakened to such an extent that anyone who represented it today might seem positively eccentric.

Enter Robert Grant, Professor of the History of Ideas in the English Department at Glasgow University: a critic who for many years has been ploughing a lonely furrow in what used to be this central and fertile field. Imagining the Real is the second in a projected trilogy of collected pieces; the first, The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, appeared four years ago. The new volume, like the previous one, covers a wide range of topics (from honesty to Derrida, from The Tempest to game theory), but with a consistent purpose: to explore the ways in which culture is the bearer and guarantor of human values, and to expose the errors of those who think otherwise.

Of the ...